Project Veritas, Progressive Academia, and Our National Security

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has unveiled a new shocking video. Officials from Barry University in Florida, a private and Catholic institution founded in 1940, appear more than willing to approve the inception of a campus club that would raise money to support ISIS, the very terrorists who are killing indiscriminately Muslims, Christians, and gays in Iraq, taking over regions that were formerly freed by our American soldiers.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3017455/Barry-University-officials-approve-club-raising-money-ISIS-video.html#ixzz3VtVglW1o

According to the Vice President for Student Affairs, as quoted by the Daily Mail Online, “Barry University would not approve any group supporting a terrorist organization.” But other universities have revealed in previously released videos that they have no problem with ISIS and Hamas being on their campus.

This video contradicts our National Security Strategy which was released in February 2015 from the executive office. It addressed security, prosperity, values, and international order. One of the important issues in the report involves “combating the persistent threat of terrorism.” Yet colleges are sanctioning and willing to support terrorist groups.

“This new National Security Strategy positions the United States to safeguard our national interests through strong and sustainable leadership.” Apparently, this strong and sustainable leadership, in partnership with Congress, has “helped the world recover from a global economic crisis and respond to an array of emerging challenges.”

One such challenge is the “potential proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons,” posing a great risk. I do hope Iran got the message that they must stop in their tracks any non-peaceful nuclear arming.

Because we are a “global force for good,” we must “lead with a purpose,” in line with the 2010 National Security Strategy:

-          Secure the U.S, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners;

-          Grow the U.S. economy in an “open international economic system;”

-          Respect “universal values at home and around the world;”

-          International order based on rules “advanced by U.S. leadership,” promoting “peace, security, and opportunity through stronger cooperation to meet global challenges.”

What are the top risks to our interests?

-          “Catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland or critical infrastructure

-          Threats or attacks against U.S. citizens abroad and our allies;

-          Global economic crisis or widespread economic slowdown;

-          Proliferation and/or use of weapons of mass destruction;

-          Severe global infectious disease outbreaks;

-          Climate change; (Who knew suddenly climate changing from season to season could be

           such a threat!)

-          Major energy market disruptions; (Maybe closing so many coal-fired power plants may not have been such a good idea)

-          Significant security consequences associated with weak or falling states (including mass atrocities, regional spillover, and transnational organized crime).” 

The Arab Winter comes to mind under this rubric and the drug cartel members coming unimpeded through our porous southern borders.

According to this report, America must lead “with strength,” “by example,” “with capable partners,” “with all the instruments of U.S. power,” and “with a long-term perspective.”

Since the last National Security Strategy in 2010, five recent transitions have been identified as significantly changing our security landscape, the academic progressivism not withstanding:

1.      “Power among states is more dynamic,” i.e., India’s potential, China’s rise, Russia’s aggression, impacting “the future of major power relations.”

2.      “Power is shifting below and beyond the nation-state.” Weak governments or authoritarian regimes have to deal with technology, growing middle class, and unruly “youth as a majority in many societies.”

3.      “Increasing interdependence of the global economy,” creating vulnerability through interconnected systems and sectors “susceptible to the threats of climate change, malicious cyber activity, pandemic diseases, and transnational terrorism and crime.”

4.      “Struggle for power among and within many states in the Middle East and North Africa.” The report points out “religious extremists” and “rulers that reject democratic reforms, exploit their economies, and crush civil society.”

5.      “Global energy market has changed dramatically.” Apparently we are now “the world’s largest natural gas and oil producer” and “we are leading a new clean energy economy.” I am not sure if this clean energy can yet supply our large economy and keep our factories running, our lights on, our heat on, and the A/C constantly powered. The report points out that our energy security has been worsened by the “European dependence on Russian natural gas and the willingness of Russia to use energy for political ends.”

In the meantime, can someone tell the U.S. academia that supporting terrorists such as ISIS or Hamas on their campuses and financing their mayhem goes against our national security strategy and interests?

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015

"The Greatest Invisible Depression"

There is no America! There is a cash machine.” – Michael Savage

Great Depression Food Line Photo: Wikipedia

We are experiencing the “Greatest Invisible Depression” in the history of the United States; the Depression Era soup kitchens and lines are unseen, coming to the mail box in the form of welfare checks, yet the government cash machine, the Fed, keeps printing bogus trillions that have no backing in goods and services.

The welfare checks keep coming but the unemployment figures reported have dropped to 5.5 percent! According to economists, 5-6 percent unemployment represents FULL employment of the economy. Yet millions of discouraged workers have conveniently disappeared from the government statistics. They are now perhaps found in three categories: disability recipients, the invisible Americans struggling on their own to survive, or the generational government-dependent Americans.

We are living through the precipitous decline and fall of the American Empire, the most successful nation in the history of mankind.  It is a sad spectacle to watch since its triumph has contributed to the success and prosperity of all humanity in spite of the revisionist lectures to the contrary coming from the progressives who are enjoying shamelessly the spoils of American capitalism and free markets.

It is hard to predict when America will trail into the ash bins of history, in the footsteps of the once successful Roman Empire, and what will drive the final nail in its coffin. What will it be?

-          The invading hordes of illegals that will colonize and vanquish the American Rome?

-          The endemic political and economic corruption at all levels of government?

-          The degradation of society, the moral decay, the destruction of the family unit?

-          The declining health of its population, the demographic self-suicide?

-          Diversity, progressive multiculturalism, thus rendering the empire unable to absorb too many divergent and unfriendly cultures?

-          Intolerance of Christianity and forced Islamization?

-          The inability to keep the borders safe?

-          The destruction of the economy from within?

-          The unsafe reductions of the armed forces and “chickification” of its ranks?

-          The unrelenting and total control of its population by changing the Constitution and the rule of law?

-          A military event resulting in the victory of a conquering nation?

What happened to Rome? They built the world’s greatest empire, the greatest military, the longest network of roads, paved streets, raised pavements, city grids, indoor and outdoor plumbing, marble palaces, bridges, military portable hospitals, portable bridges, indoor and outdoor water fountains, public baths with heated swimming pools, heated marble floors, extensive gyms, self-supporting cupolas, eleven aqueducts, just to name a few accomplishments.

Why did their civilization collapse in 476 A.D. when the last emperor resident in the West, Romulus was deposed at Ravenna? The eastern empire (the Byzantine Empire) did not fall until 1453 when the last bastion, Constantinople, fell to the Turks, to Islam. Are there parallels between Rome and our Constitutional Republic?

The distant reaches of the Roman Empire came into contact with Rome through its law, taxation, census, and coinage. The extent of Romanization of all the provinces is still a subject of debate.

Many factors have been debated such as Christianity, the rise of Islam, moral decadence, greed, invasions by barbarians, especially Goths and Vandals, lead poisoning, monetary issues, inflation, corruption, military inability to rule such a vast empire and to defend its borders, even after it split into the Western and Eastern Empire.

Edward Gibbon concentrated on four reasons for the decline of Rome. “After a diligent inquiry, I can discern four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years: the injuries of time and nature, the hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians, the use and abuse of the materials, and the domestic quarrels of the Romans.”

The domestic quarrels of the Romans are interesting to explore because Gibbon referred to peace as having been disturbed by frequent seditions, domestic hostilities, and private wars between the nobles and the people, violating the laws of the Code and of the Gospel.

The earlier history of the empire produced a slow decline over the centuries. Edward Gibbon stated, “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” Conquest yielded prosperity and, as soon as it waned, the empire folded like a house of cards, crushing under its own weight. “The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it lasted so long.” 

Bryan Ward-Perkins believed the demise of the Roman civilization was materialistic. “The capacity to mass-produce high quality goods and spread comfort makes the Roman world rather too similar to our own society, with its rampant and rapacious materialism.”

The Western Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D. and historians still argue today the many variables that contributed to its downfall. It was replaced by feudal lords who vied for power and by the Holy Roman Empire that was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

The Roman Empire was a very diverse, multicultural hodge-podge of communities allied to Rome called “socii;” of non-patrician citizen of Rome called “plebeians;” of the Roman citizens; of the cavalry troops of the Republican Rome called “equites;” of the freedmen; of the governors who ran the Roman provinces; of the “client kings;” of the Latins, inhabitants of Latium; of the patricians, the aristocratic privileged class of Rome; and of the slaves who supported the economy with their unpaid labor.

At the height of the Roman Empire, more than 25 percent of Rome’s population represented slaves. A rich Roman could own as many as 500 slaves captured and purchased from all corners of the empire, while the imperial household had as many as 20,000.

Rome was tolerant with local cultures, co-opting and rewarding willing indigenous tribes. The Romanization of those occupied is debated even though there is archeological evidence of Roman lifestyle in amphitheaters, fora, bathhouses, public restrooms, and streets aligned in grids, as far away as North Africa and the Middle East.

During the Late Roman Empire, civil service in the government and in the army brought rewards, promotions, and elitist privileges. Emperors and government officials had forgotten what the Res Publica (“Public Things”), the Republic, stood for. The interests of the republic became secondary to their success, enrichment at the public trough, and daily survival.

The fight for personal survival meant that every public servant, including ranking officers could be subject to imprisonment, torture, or killing not at the hands of the enemy but at the hands of other Romans. There are American soldiers who are rotting in jail for doing their job in wartime. And American deserters like Bowe Bergdahl are praised, promoted, and remunerated in absentia, and a soldier-murderers like Nidal Hasan escapes prosecution for his crimes.

Bureaucratic inadequacies and corruption traveled much slower in the Roman Empire. By the time a weakness became obvious, it was quite serious and hard to address. In modern U.S., bureaucratic mismanagement, corruption, and waste are well-known. News and information travel fast but are often unreported or covered up by the main stream media.

As Adrian Goldsworthy states in his book, “How Rome Fell,” “yet the warning from the Roman experience is that major catastrophic failures often arrive both suddenly and unanticipated.”  It is Goldsworthy’s opinion that the “fatal decline of the empire came from internal problems.” The self-inflicted decline was impossible to determine when it reached the point of no return.

Is our American superpower in decline and at the point of no return? We are unable to defend our border with Mexico in the same manner that the Romans were unable to defend their Rhine-Danube frontier. Whittaker, in his book, “Rome and Its Frontiers,” made an analogy:

“The Roman Empire of the fourth century was in some ways undergoing the same kind of transformation as the modern nation-state in the face of globalization. Both can be viewed as what Karl Marx called “disordered societies”; that is, as societies where traditional values were in conflict with new interests, when relations between national and foreign cultures were being renegotiated, and when the concept of ethnicity was being redefined under pressure from external frontiers.”

In 376, a large group of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire’s Danube frontier, asking for asylum. According to Peter Heather, “in a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued.” Within two years, they revolted, destroyed two-thirds of the army and killed the very emperor Valens who received them. It is interesting to note that some of the refugees that we accepted in our own country have become hostile and are trying to destroy our way of life by using tolerance and accusations of bigotry, racism, and Islamophobia against us.

In 301 A.D. emperor Diocletian had an unfortunate idea to curb inflation by passing a law with a harsh punishment for breaking it: death. His law fixed maximum prices for about 1,000 goods, including food, raw materials, textiles, transportation, and wages. The law was not the first tried but the scale was massive and Diocletian was determined to make it successful.  Anyone who tried to keep goods off the market would be summarily executed. A series of financial crashes caused people to rush to turn their money into goods, creating a rate of inflation of 1,000% because there was too much money chasing too few goods. The coins were so debased, that what looked like precious metal was mostly copper underneath.

How will we cope when the American economy crashes? What or who will replace the American Empire?     

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015

Conformity and Collectivist Core

Photo credit: Web and Facebook

During a late evening visit to our local restaurant, I witnessed a progressive middle-aged couple pleading with their young child to give up a toy she had taken from her playmate’s home. As they were arguing back and forth, loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, all I could think of was, why bring a small child so late to a restaurant and, for God’s sake, isn’t anybody in charge of their children anymore?

Have parents relegated their parental authority and their rights to raise and educate their children entirely to schools, to progressive ideology, and to the federal government? Do parents even know what their children are taught and if so, do they care what their precious kids learn every day?

As a former college teacher, I know from experience that some parents cannot wait to get their children out of the house; some only care if they are fed and safe from harm; some only care that test scores are up and their children are promoted, even socially promoted, to the next grade; some only care that they get a diploma at the end of twelve years; others that their entrance exams are high enough to get them scholarships and admission to the college of their dreams; and some delude themselves that their children are getting a balanced education in line with our American values.

Do many parents bother to sit in a classroom to hear for themselves? Are parents even allowed anymore to sit in a class? Are parents allowed to express their opinions to the school board without being arrested for trespassing or thrown out of the meeting because they dared to ask an inconvenient question?

A Chinese American mom from Colorado was pleading with the school board in her county to reject Common Core because it is the same curriculum as the Communist Core in China. Lily Tang Williams, who came to America for freedom, grew up under Mao’s China. Nationalized standards represent communist indoctrination, she said, preparing students to be good little workers and not to think critically and independently.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAIetn6sE00

“Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers; they are trained to be cash machines and trained workers for corporations.”  She asked rhetorically, “What happened to individual rights and individual freedom in America? Where are the parents? Why Common Core, this top down education from the federal government with corporations holding the carrots and the federal government the sticks? Do you want your children to be cheap workers for American corporations? Do not follow China’s model! Their system produces great test-takers but not critical thinkers!” Pleading with the board, Lily said that it took her ten years to get rid of the brainwashing she suffered in her native China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaSvC9PGKk

The assault on our children and our parental rights is relentless. The government is dictating what we feed them, how we raise them, whether they are allowed to walk from school; they are going to weigh them in schools without parental consent, and they are going to collect biometrics on our children in order to build up a national database tracking them from cradle to grave. Ask yourselves why? What is happening to our privacy, God-given rights, and freedoms?

Teaching is an art and every child has God-given talents that must be nurtured individually as much as possible. Children are not numbers that can be neatly boxed into a rubric for the convenience of Conformity Core dictated by the government.  

Florida Standards Assessments (FSA) is testing for the Common Core which is supported by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. http://www.fsassessments.org/resources/?section=3-test-administrators

One young child, Sydney Smoot, a fourth grader at Brooksville Elementary School, spoke on March 17, 2015 to the Hernando County School Board, voicing very articulately and with aplomb, her concerns about FSA testing.

What are Sydney’s concerns? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogBuz4dU5Ew

1.       One test and one end-of- the-year score defines her as a failure or a success, regardless of anything else Sydney learned in five years of school.

2.       She cannot share anything nor discuss the test with her parents. Why if it involves her education and her future?

3.       Why should she be forced to take one test that has not been tested nor validated on other students in Florida? How could it be accurate and reflect what she knows?

4.       Why stress children the entire year, often eliminating recess and other fun activities, in order to prep for one test only, when they should be taught and tested throughout the year, measuring along the way what they have learned? To accurately measure progress and what they know, students should be tested at the beginning of the year, middle of the year, and end of the year.

Seasoned teachers, who understand what is at stake, are resigning in protest. Oklahoma City math teacher, Juli Sylvan, with more than 20 years teaching experience, expressed in her resignation letter her objection to the data-mining of children, the implementation of the Common Core standards in “defiance of state law,” and the fact that “It is a complete takeover of what is taught in the public school system. It takes away the individual’s freedom and joy of learning because of the one size fits all approach. All students don’t learn or express themselves in the same way. Common Core tends to do away with individualism — which is one of the attributes that makes America great. Diversity is one of our greatest resources, but Common Core erodes this great strength by taking parents, teachers, and elected officials out of the decision making process.” http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/20443-in-resignation-oklahoma-teacher-blows-whistle-on-common-core

 

According to Sylvan, even though Oklahoma passed a law ending Common Core in the state, education officials have continued implementing the Common Core standards in violation of the state law by using the scheme of Teacher Leadership Effectiveness (TLE) to coerce teachers into Common Core compliance.

Governor Mary Fallin signed into law HB 3399 on June 5, 2014, which withdrew Oklahoma from the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSSI), “allowing the state to adopt its own public education standards.”  http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/2014/201406100.asp

 

Sylvan told The New American that “I was constantly being harassed and threatened with termination for not implementing Common Core components (data collection, testing, teaching strategies aligned to Common Core)”…  “As a teacher in the classroom in that environment with constantly being harassed, my ability to protect my students from Common Core was being rapidly diminished.” Her conscience did not allow her to “promote or contribute to the implementation of Common Core.”

 

And Common Core testing is now aligned with the national standardized testing for college entrance exams.

 

I came across a pamphlet from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) which is a non-profit organization launched in 1995 in D.C. with the purpose “to promote academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability in higher education.”  

 

ACTA has a difficult job since colleges and universities in the U.S. are experiencing low academic standards, weak curricula, more than double the rate of inflation tuition fees, more demand for public and private funding, no accountability to students, alumni, and taxpayers, and attacks on anything American, on free thought and on free speech, usually relegated to a “free speech” zone, a tiny campus spot far away from the usual student foot traffic.

 

Teaching, learning, rational debate, free exchange of ideas, and the pursuit of truth are under attack, quite literally in some cases, where students were physically threatened and attacked by their teachers and the courts upheld this abominable behavior.

 

Professors have the freedom to speak their minds but students’ academic freedom is another story.  A scientific study commissioned by ACTA found that almost half of students attended classes in which professors frequently used political comments in their classes even though they were totally unrelated to the subject; 46% said that professors used the classroom to express personal political views;  and 42% “reported reading assignments that presented only one side of controversial issues.” A Zogby poll found that 58% of Americans believe bias in the classroom is a very serious problem.

 

With adult literacy and skills declining thanks to fluff courses and watered down curricula, and worthless degrees, the student loan debt has ballooned to $826 billion, larger than the credit card debt, while jobs for college graduates are scarce.

 

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that millions of college-educated Americans cannot understand newspaper editorials or instructions for taking medicine. As students learn less and less, they take longer and longer to graduate. In 2007, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems reported a six-year graduation rate of 56.1 percent. The four-year graduation rate is so low that colleges no longer record it. www.goacta.org

 

The moral of the story is, if you want education to decline even further, and creative individualism that built such a successful America, the former envy of the world to disappear, and, if you want to transform American students into pliant proletariat workers for crony capitalist corporations, Common Core is the way to indoctrinate them into the collectivist utopian mindset.

 

By Hook and By Crook, You Are Going to Pay for Climate Change

“Science has become the new stepchild of politics.” – Michael Savage

It’s the first day of spring and we are having snow again. Not much, a couple of inches, just enough to prove that March always goes out like a lion. Undeterred, global progressives, intent on sending us into the stone age of technology, are forcing their agenda of redistributive taxation of man-made global warming/climate change on everyone.

But that’s not all. According to Dr. Klaus Kaiser, Central Europe experienced a Mother Nature event – a total solar eclipse around 9 a.m., March 20, 2015, the spring equinox,  and a super-moon. It will be interesting to see how electric power plants dependent heavily on solar power fared in a shut-down during the day when energy demand is at its peak. And the most vulnerable was Germany which derives a larger percent of its electricity needs from solar power. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/70574

Dr. Kaiser said, “With well over 10,000 wind turbines in operation, the European electric grid has already experienced instability close to collapse.  The (far) offshore system Bard-1 in the German Bight, built for approximately $5 billion two years ago is slowly rusting in the sea. It is a real money maker—for the legal profession.”

Dominion Virginia Power has offered customers in their monthly billing the whimsical “Green Power,” to reduce the family’s carbon footprint in 2015, a “voluntary option that enables customers to match their electricity use with clean, renewable energy from wind (78%), solar (1%), and biomass (21%).”  Dominion offers two choices:

-          100% Option, matching 100 percent of a customer’s electricity use with Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), at a cost of 1.3 cents per kWh.

-          Block Option, purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) in fixed monthly increments; each $2 supports 154 kWh of renewable energy.

Such voluntary options are nothing more than customers subsidizing unnecessarily expensive energy generation that is not really clean, it is the industry’s “dirty little secret,” as someone called it years ago.

Having researched the wind and solar power generation extensively, and having written a bestseller and numerous articles on the topic, I know that renewable energy is neither cheap, nor clean, nor victimless. There are millions of animal casualties, chopped birds by wind turbines and fried birds by solar panels’ heat flux; animals experience bizarre behavior, fertility issues, and spontaneous abortion of fetuses when living in close proximity to wind farms; humans experience serious health effects as well when in close proximity to wind turbines and from their home smart meters attached to the smart grid.

One of the more interesting presentations I heard at CPAC 2015 was the panel on “Climate: What Tom Steyer Won’t Tell You.”

Representative Bill Flores (TX-17) addressed the global warming alarmism, pointing out that this administration has done everything in its power to stop domestic energy production in this country, spending billions of dollars for bankrupt solar energy producers like Solyndra. He enumerated the six “inconvenient truths” of those promoting the climate agenda:

1.       It kills U.S. jobs.

2.       It costs trillions of dollars.

3.       It’s based on junk science.

4.       It uses fantasy technology that is yet to be developed.

5.       It manipulates cost/benefit analysis by using junk economics.

6.       It fails the smell test.

Rep. Flores stated that Obama’s energy agenda, via EPA’s tightening regulations such as ozone levels and Waters of the U.S., kills 3 million American jobs, exporting them to China and India, and importing their pollution back to the United States. “By 2020, the EPA’s ozone regulations will eliminate $3.5 trillion of economic output.” There is no credible evidence that ozone levels cause increased health issues for Americans but poverty does, Rep. Flores added. Because the EPA knows that California cannot meet its stringent ozone standards, then California is excluded from the equation.

It is EPA regulatory malpractice, said Rep. Flores, as evidenced by the attempt to change the definition of water in the Waters of the U.S. from “navigable waters” to any puddle of rain that falls in a farmer’s field.

Tom Steyer, a “green” energy devotee, has pledged $100 million in 2014 to Democrats who oppose the Keystone pipeline and favor the disuse of fossil fuels over renewables.  Steyer opposes coal in an attempt to boost the value of his solar projects.  According to John Hinderaker, “Steyer owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s largest financiers of coal projects.” http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/the-epic-hypocrisy-of-tom-steyer.php

Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, jocularly introduced as the “enemy number one to the climate change agenda,” talked about the environmental noose that was put around the world’s global economy in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro and the decades since then that tightened that noose. Obama took control of the economy through ever more stringent environmental regulations even though there has been no global warming in the last 18 years.  

Pointing out that the entire global warming fiasco is based on faulty IPCC computer modeling, Ebell said, “Do you trust the models or the actual data?” Ninety-seven percent of climate change scientists say, trust us, we have the models. “If the models and the data don’t agree, change the data.” The deception was exacerbated by the infamous hockey stick graph, Ebell added.  Every agency of the federal government views global warming as the greatest national security threat.  John Kerry, our Secretary of State, said in a speech that climate change is his number one priority.

Gary Broadbent, representing Murray Energy Corporation, the largest privately held coal mine in the U.S., highlighted Obama’s “war on coal” via regulations passed by EPA alone in the last five years totaling 25,000 pages.  Quoting Robert E. Murray, Chairman of Murray Energy Corporation, Broadband said, “Prior to the election of President Obama, coal provided 52% of the electricity generation in our country. Today it is 37%. In our judgement, it will further decline to about 30%, at a maximum.”

Enumerating the 411 power plants designated for closure through 2016, “101,000 megawatts of the lowest cost electricity in America,” CEO Murray wrote that electricity, generated by coal at the plant cost of 4 cents per kWh, will be replaced by “Mr. Obama and his appointees” with 15 cent per kWh electricity from natural gas and 22 cent per kWh electricity from wind and solar power, not to mention the huge subsidies to solar power from American taxpayers.

In CEO Murray’s opinion, the Obama Administration has bypassed illegally Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the States and their Public Utility Commissions, which are “empowered to regulate the availability and cost of electricity.”

According to Chairman Murray, while we came within 700 megawatts of reducing loads to 61 million Americans in 13 states during the Polar Vortex of 2014, “China has been building a new 500 megawatt coal-fired plant every week for years, [and] burned about 4.0 billion tons of coal last year.”

CEO Robert E. Murray offered multiple examples that “the global ‘climate change’ scare is purely political and not based on any science:

-          According to NASA satellites and ground-based temperature measurements, the earth has not warmed for the last eighteen years and five months. But CO2 levels have risen almost ten percent since 1997.

-          Seventy percent of the years since the Ice Age were warmer than today.

-          There has been a decline in the world land area under drought in the past thirty years.

-          Rates of sea-level rise remain infinitesimal, averaging only about one millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges.

-          Satellites show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979.

-          2012 and 2013 IPCC reports concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era.

-          The past year was not the warmest on record, as Mr. Obama claimed during his State of the Union address, which I attended, on January 20.”

On this sunless first day of spring, with cold temperatures, rain, sleet, and snow in the northeast, we should be thankful to the cold industry for producing enough energy to keep us warm and our large economy running smoothly. There is no secret that the environmental NGOs such the Sierra Club, Natural Resource Defense Council, and rich individuals promoting “Beyond Coal,” are influencing EPA’s overregulation of the manufacturing sector under the guise of saving the planet, to the detriment of our economy, and destroying wealth and the middle class in the process. The war on coal is real and so is the war on our free market-based way of life.

 Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

"A Billion Minutes Ago Jesus Was Alive" and Mega Data

The author of Lazarus Man, Chet Nagle, spoke to the Republican Women of Clifton on March 18, 2015 about “The cyber world and you, and how I learned to rob banks – with a computer.”  

The cyber world is a daunting ether space inhabited by bytes, kilobytes , megabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes (ZB). Each measurement is larger than the previous one by increments of 1,000. It is so huge that one zettabyte can hold almost five quadrillion books of 200 pages each.

According to Nagle’s research, the Internet held 1.2 ZB in 2009, 2.8 ZB in 2012, and it is expected to grow to 40 ZB by 2020. Imagine 1.2 ZB as 75 billion fully loaded 16 GB iPads, stacked 339 miles into the sky.

Humans produce now in two days “more information than was created in all of history up until the year 2003.” Nagle said that “if you had bought the computing power found inside an iPhone 5s in 1991, it would have cost you $3.56 million. A TI-83 calculator’s computing power could have taken astronauts to the moon in 1969.”

In the seventies one computer occupied an entire building. Now a major international bank needs just five servers, each the size of an ordinary box.

The data is stored in computers, laptops, iPads, tablets, cell phones, external flash drives, servers in schools, businesses, companies, government, and servers in the “cloud.”

The Mother Ship is the NSA Cloud in Utah where water and electricity are plentiful, enabling its global Cloud to exist. They save not just Meta data, they store EVERYTHING of EVERYBODY around the world, citizens and governments. “If it’s on the Internet and it can be picked up with antennas, it’s there,” said Nagle. Even Hillary’s emails are there, he added, “now try to get them out.”

In addition to personal and banking information, addresses, social security numbers, 70 million medical records are stolen, a veritable cash trove of blackmail. If a database can be hacked, the hacker can engage not just in identity theft but also in identity change.

According to wired.com, an entire town in Romania owes its bustling economy to online hackers. “Râmnicu Vâlcea is a town whose business is cybercrime, and business is booming.” The town of 120,000 is known to the cyber world as Hackerville. http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/

The situation is so out of control that the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Secret Service held a Cybercrime Seminar in Brasov on October 3, 2012, sponsored by American Express, EBay, Microsoft, Western Union, Trustwave, and MoneyGram International, the larger victims of cyber-criminal activity.

Cybernetics, the study of how humans and machines control and communicate information, has been around since 1948, and it is thought to derive from the Greek word “kybernētēs,” meaning pilot, governor (from kybernan to steer, govern).

The cyber world and its data are under attack from many fronts. There is hacking by those malcontents who want to get even with the perceived wrong-doers. There are criminal hackers who want your identity and want to profit financially from access to your information. There is the possibility of EMP attacks from an enemy force such as a country’s government or from natural disasters such as solar flares. Last but not least are cyberwars, nations being the biggest hackers. A case in point is China, which employs hundreds of thousands of young hackers. They placed malware in the New York Times servers as discovered in 2013. Russia used cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 and “shut the country down, basically.” They used it in 2008 in Georgia. Ukraine and Russia are currently using cyber-attacks on each other on phones, military vehicles, radios, electronics, GPS systems, anything vulnerable, and anything is vulnerable today.

Malware is software with malicious content designed by young computer intellects. Kaspersky Labs see 325,000 new malware attacks daily. Stuxnet attacked the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, probably developed by U.S./Israel. Lizzard Stressor got into routers, using Wi-Fi to access data. Tyupkin in Eastern Europe inserted malware into ATMs. Dark Hotel inserted malware into business travelers’ cell phones, laptops, and tablets. Last but not least, Nagle mentioned Regin & Flame, U.S. cyber-attack programs.

The 228,700 cyber incidents recorded in 2013 more than doubled when compared with the 100,000 incidents recorded in 2009, said Chet Nagle. Today, Homeland Security reports half a million such incidents a day because the computing power has doubled every year and hackers have become more sophisticated.

The Internet is going to be controlled in this country via the innocuous-sounding net neutrality under the guise of “fairness.” It is already controlled in countries like Cuba, China, and North Korea and we know what that does to freedom of speech, thought, and the ability to write and publish.

Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called net neutrality “Obamcare for the Internet,” because the government will determine “internet pricing, terms of service, and the types of products and services that can be delivered, resulting in fewer choices, fewer opportunities, and higher prices for consumers.” John Boehner (R-Ohio) believes it will “destroy innovation and entrepreneurship.”

http://theweek.com/speedreads/441874/heres-conservative-case-against-net-neutrality

 

 

 

 

A New Breed of Global Communism on Steroids

Politicians like to tell us ad nauseam that the immigration system is broken. What exactly is broken? I asked this question recently of the panel on immigration at CPAC 2015. It became obvious that conservatives and progressives conflate the issue of legal immigration with the issue of illegal immigration.

One of the panelists began to show us a very complex chart of the LEGAL immigration system and the hoops and offices that a person must navigate in order to legally immigrate to this country. The system appeared no different than the system in place in 1982 when I became a naturalized American citizen. We are told that there are 4.1 million unresolved applications for LEGAL permanent residence in the United States, some of them backlogged 15 years or more. These people want to join their families already legally in the U.S. They are unfortunate that they cannot jump a fence, swim across a river, or walk across the desert. They are not the chosen ones to be flown or bussed across the border by our own government that wants to fundamentally change the demographic makeup of our country.

What politicians and their minions talk about when they refer to the broken immigration system, is the wait time for LEGAL immigrants. What IS BROKEN is the fact that the government is not securing the borders, and is not enforcing the laws already on the books in regards to ILLEGAL immigration into our country.

Rep. Robert Pittenger of North Carolina, Chairman of the Congressional Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare is telling us that “Americans should prepare to protect their homes, businesses, and families in the event of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster” in a 24-page booklet that was just released.

Yet they are leaving our southern and northern borders vulnerable to entry of any citizen of another country who wants amnesty. And we are not just talking about illegal Mexicans. Border patrols have found prayer rugs and Qurans abandoned in the desert on the southern border.

The government is bringing in refugees from countries that hate our western culture, our legal system, and our way of life. They are bringing in thousands of refugees each month from Somalia and Syria to resettle them in the United States, knowing that these people are not interested in learning our language, accepting our culture, and becoming Americans.  As soon as they arrive, they become wards of the state, and start making demands to install Shariah Law and to accommodate their needs for madrassas schools, for exercise of their Islamic religion, and to take down anything that is American and offensive to them: our flag, our National Anthem, our Pledge of Allegiance, and our Christian religious symbols.

The new standards of education called Common Core, adopted pretty much around the country, are indoctrinating our children into communism and proselytize for Islam. It’s no news that academia has been communist for years but lately the assault against anything American has picked up speed. Take the case of the Irvine, University of California ban on the American flag. It is not the work of misguided individual students; they are supported by their professors. These are not isolated incidents. They are happening around the country at every level of our educational system and of our government.

When I came to this country legally, I had every intention of assimilating into the American culture, of learning the language, and becoming a contributing member of society. I did not run to the nearest Social Security office to sign up for benefits, to vote illegally, and to form barrios, countries within our country, bringing with me the hellhole I escaped from.

Politicians tell us that these people come here to work; they don’t come for the welfare or the in-state tuition. But the welfare figures and the earned income tax credit given to newly arrived illegals are in the billions of dollars a year and they are incontrovertible evidence that most don’t come here to work and then return home to their countries. They are here to stay; we are their social featherbed and financial support. The IRS tells us that they are entitled to retroactive earned income tax credit for 2011-2013 to the tune of $35,000 per family, even though they paid no taxes in those years and were here illegally.

Politicians and the main stream media tell us that illegals live in the shadows, they are euphemistically called undocumented Americans. They don’t live in the shadows. They draw welfare, they go to the same churches with us, they shop at the same stores, and they send their kids to the same day care, kindergartens, and schools. On the day when SNAP and EBT are distributed, all the cash registers at Walmart have lines of Hispanics and Middle Easterners who do not speak a word of English, not even “thank you.”

The illegal children that arrived last year to supposedly join their families were not all children after all , some were known-gang members and drug dealers from Mexico, many were sick, bringing in diseases that were formerly eradicated in the U.S. and new ones that are endemic to Central America. Some of our children have died from the enterovirus and a mysterious paralysis. Some adults contracted antibiotic-resistant TB. Illegals brought in measles, scabies, Chagas disease, and lice.

In New Hampshire there are some schools were 82 different languages are spoken.  How do you accommodate so many different children who do not speak English and have no relatives, and still maintain a semblance of normalcy in schools where scores are now plummeting?  How do you maintain standards of excellence without dragging down American students?

Churches took them in with open arms because they received millions of dollars in grants to do so from the federal government. It was not just the Christian thing to do; it was a money-making machine. The children were injected into small communities around the country, mostly without the knowledge of the population. Talk about forced colonization!

Many of these illegal immigrants come from dictatorships of communism, socialism, or totalitarianism. They don’t know what a democracy is, don’t care, and will not understand it. Many are illiterate in their own languages. Democracy for them is welfare from the government. Their trust and belief system are in BIG government. Capitalism and self-reliance are foreign concepts to them. Piracy, theft, cheating, stealing, bartering to survive, and a poor work ethic are the norm.

I remember the feelings of elation when I arrived in New York. I deplaned and I breathed freedom into my lungs. I knew, if I worked hard, I could be anything I wanted to be because I had freedom of opportunity, not guaranteed welfare. I did not expect anybody to support me and I did not expect others to translate everything for me into my language while I lazily pretended that I was too dumb to learn.

I still had a tremendous fear of the police state I escaped from and cringed every time someone knocked on the door and my heart pounded when I saw a policeman. Under communism, they were there to harass and to control us. We were always guilty no matter what.

Thirty-seven years later, I find myself more each day reliving the former communist country I fled in 1978. We now live in a neo-communism of sorts where the police state is everywhere, surveillance is more sophisticated and intrusive than the Soviets would have ever thought of; there is no need to place a spy on each street or stairwell in every block of apartments who registered the comings and goings of residents. There is no need to wiretap someone’s phone or home.

Now we have electronic surveillance that is neatly stored by NSA in Utah. If we don’t make it easy for them via Facebook and other social media, they now have installed smart grids, smart meters, smart appliances that communicate with the mother ship everything we do in our own homes under the guise of convenience, saving the planet from manufactured and imagined global warming, and saving us money. They are spying on us without a warrant not just with drones and cameras at every intersection, but with our TVs, our laptops, our GPS devices, our car computers, and even medical tags and I.D. tags embedded under your skin.

The immigrants of today are a total different breed from the immigrants of 37 years ago. They are here to demographically alter the makeup of our society in order to “fundamentally change” who we are as a nation, just like we were promised by our president five days before Inauguration. He has been mystifyingly successful beyond anybody’s imagination.

The 30-50 million illegals that were amnestied by both parties in Congress will change America into a borderless country with no identity, no sense of real history, no traditions, no pride, a hodge-podge of global citizens of various ethnic backgrounds and multi-cultures who have no allegiance to the Founding Fathers, to the Constitution, and to the citizens before us who have sacrificed themselves and built this country with their treasure, sweat, tears, and blood.

If you want to know what America will look like ten or twenty years from now, look at Sweden, Paris, London, Marseille, Belgium and other countries where senescent populations are replaced by fertile Middle Eastern and African populations. Europeans and now Americans are not having enough babies, instead are strolling dogs and cats. This fundamental change was brought by decades of progressive indoctrination in schools and universities that have destroyed the fabric of many societies with their preaching of communism, tolerance, diversity, multi-culturalism, and immorality.

For the last seven years, we have gone daily and weekly from one manufactured crisis to another, where a misperceived social injustice had to be redressed by creating more and more bureaucracies that we will never be able to undo. We have become the most racially divided that this country has ever been, thanks to the current administration.

We have witnessed the creation of the progressive thought police and intolerance, labeling everyone with whom they disagree as bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and domestic terrorists. We have also witnessed the government’s social engineering in action and takeover of the main stream media, of morality, marriage, education, finance, banking, housing, car manufacturing, health care, of millions of acres of arable land and parks, of the military, the Internet, privacy, nutrition, free speech, free assembly, of religion, and pretty soon the last bastions – the state police and the personal freedom to bear arms. It is déjà vu for me but it is communism on steroids.

Copyright:  ILEANA JOHNSON  2015