Icemageddon and Icecrete

For ten days, acres and acres of land and forest have been encased by thick ice which refused to melt; and it was not just the intense cold that accompanied it. Even when the sun shone, nothing was melting; even chunks of ice off the deck refused to melt with a flame. The pristine ice turned black, yellow, and looked like icecrete.

No animals dared to trek this glacial landscape shining in the daylight and at night like reflecting glass. It was seven days before animals dared to venture on this Icemageddon surface in search of food. 

Al Gore just celebrated twenty years since he released a Power Point presentation on global warming which garnered him a Nobel Prize. Earth had twelve years before Armageddon and ice in Antarctica would be melted. Gore’s presentation said polar bears would not have ice floes to float on while looking for food and would die off. Bears have multiplied, ice is thicker than ever, and we are still here.

The global warming alarmists tried their hardest to convince the “deniers” that global warming exists. When it failed, they morphed it into climate change industry.

Dr. Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton, among many other real scientists who do not rely on fake science called “consensus” to make faulty predictions, testified before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on February 25, 2009 that “over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never have CO2 levels been so low as it has been in the Holocene – 280 ppm (parts per million) – that is unheard of. Most of the time CO2 levels have been at least 1,000 ppm and it’s been quite higher than that. Earth was just fine in those times. The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So, it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started.” He added that, “children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.”  Happer said, “the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind. Earth in Carbon Dioxide Famine, Says Scientist - The New American

Reality did not stop global-warming alarmists to promote incredibly wasteful and expensive “carbon sequestration” and carbon “cap and trade” schemes to reduce CO2.

CO2 increase will benefit crop yields, more food for humans and animals, robust forest and vegetation growth, greater plant resistance to stress and disease, drought resistance, and reclaiming deserts and barren lands.

Green houses use extra CO2 pumped into solariums to promote faster and better plant growth. Satellite images show that CO2 is thicker around the Amazonian forests.

Is CO2 responsible for warming due to greenhouse gases? Scientists agree that “at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds.” And the current warming period started around 1800s at the end of the Little Ice Age, “long before there was an appreciable increase in CO2.”

“There have been similar and even larger [global] warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. [Warming can be influenced by solar flares, volcanic eruptions, and oceanic currents.] Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models."

Happer said, “The earth’s climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth’s temperature-- on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can.” Microsoft Word - Happer Senate Testimony - SPPI Reprint update - 6-14-10

Is the push to reduce CO2 more an effort to fleece the taxpayers? Is the Green lobby’s agenda to create a crisis that only they can solve? Are solutions more destructive than the crises? Are they brainwashing students to promote their agenda? It appears so.

Massive geoengineering efforts currently in progress around the world aim to block the sun with various substances to mitigate global warming. Scientists believe that this activity is most damaging to the planet.

Controlling, reducing, and capturing CO2 produces the science that creates most funding for professorial research and promotion. But, with less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the earth will be colder, covered in more ice, and home to sparser levels of all vegetation. A reduction in food supply due to shorter growing seasons would spell disaster and potential famine.

With little regulation, the climate change industry is happy to capture carbon in pipes. On February 22, 2020, a CO2 pipeline ruptured and exploded in Satartia, MS, following heavy rains. Two hundred people were evacuated and forty-five were hospitalized; cars stopped working in the absence of oxygen, emergency vehicles could not start, and people were unconscious on the ground for a while. Heavy CO2 spewed for four hours. A pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi has lessons for future CO2 projects : NPR

Large CO2 volume sucks oxygen out of the air. People and animals become disoriented, the heart malfunctions, seizures can appear, and eventual death by asphyxiation.

CO2 will disperse in open air but, in the Satartia incident, it remained for hours. To this day people have lung problems and other health related issues.

Coincidentally, a week prior, the Biden administration had announced $251 million for various projects focused on CO2 transport and storage. In 2020, 5300 miles of carbon capture pipes existed, with future projections of 65,000 miles. Billions have been invested in helping companies that collect CO2 to store it by sending it via pipelines to underground locations with the correct geology for storage. A pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi has lessons for future CO2 projects : NPR

Another poisoning with massive CO2 happened in northwestern Cameroon at Lake Nyos on August 21, 1986, following a limnic eruption which released 100,000-300,000 tons of magmatic CO2. The eruption killed 1,746 people, 3,500 livestock, and injured 845 more people in an area of sixteen miles around the lake.

According to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, there have been 112 CO2 pipeline accidents on record. Ten states have had carbon dioxide pipeline accidents and Texas had the most.  Carbon dioxide pipelines: A statistical analysis of historical accidents - ScienceDirect

How many CO2 accidents must happen in the name of carbon neutrality?

U.N.’s war against climate “deniers” ramped up at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30) held in Brazil in November 2025. The Declaration at this conference was a pledge to ‘fight false information’ about climate change. The only problem is that the U.N. is disseminating ‘consensus’ science. which is not real science.

NOTE: All photos were taken by Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

 

The High Line and the Rotary Snowplow

A small park in Breckenridge is dedicated to the railroad workers of the South Park Line who kept the rail line operational from 1873 to 1937, a feat that required backbreaking work and sacrifice under harsh weather in winter – bitter cold, high winds, tall mounds of drifting snow, and avalanches. Brave railroaders fought the severe weather all winter long.

The winter days were so cold that, despite doubling up on wool underwear, shirts, pants, socks, coveralls, and jackets, by the end of the day, all clothes were frozen on the rail workers’ bodies. Returning home from a day’s work, men had to stand by the fire to thaw out before their wives were able to peel off their frozen clothing.

The Summit Historical Society in Colorado preserved amazing photos of the difficult snow weather conditions when the train and its huge rotary plow was covered in snow and frozen over. One photo shows an engine and the bucking plow at Kokomo in the Ten Mile Canyon, around 1915.

There were many things that could derail the train and cause horrible accidents in the middle of a gale and snow, when visibility was low – packed ice, snow, and rocks.

Archive photo of 1915

In blinding conditions, train engineers used a “bucking” or “butterfly” plow like No. 9 to push through the high snow drifts. When the engine stopped because of the high drifts, the engineer uncoupled the engine from the train and charged the drift, reversing the engine and “bucking” until “he rammed his way through.” According to the experts, the “bucking” required skill on the part of the engineer; if he did not back up fast enough, the engine could stall.

Railroaders were a tough bunch. They could not communicate with their dispatcher, they were on their own to extricate themselves from mountains of snow and ice, clear the track, and keep the train and the line moving. And they had one tool that helped them fight avalanches and tall drifts on Borcas Pass and Ten Mile Canyon, the “High Line” – the rotary snowplow.

The 108-ton rotary engine snowplow required six or seven “smoke-belching locomotives” to help propel it forward while the blades worked like a modern snow blower, blasting snow up to thirty feet on both sides of the railroad tracks.

According to the Summit Historical Society, the snowplow required four people to operate it – the pilot, the engineer, and two firemen. “The pilot sat in front, behind the blades, where he had a clear view of the track. Over the roar of the engine and blades, the pilot used whistle signals to communicate with the engines pushing the rotary.” Because the noise was so deafening, the pilot and the engineer communicated using bells and hand signals. I wonder how quickly this crew developed deafness from the high decibels, particularly since each shift lasted twelve hours.

The weather was so rough, the plow’s doors would ice-shut and had to be pried open from the outside. The rotary plow would be overwhelmed by snow and stop. During such time, “snow diggers” (“snowbirds”) would shovel the soaring drifts by hand, bringing the snow’s height to the height of the plow so that “the rotary could resume chewing through the snow.” These snow diggers lived in box cars, going wherever the rotary plow went.

One engine of the rotary snowplow

Railroad water bucket

Travel across the nation has come a long way since those times. Humans have always used ingenuity to beat the harsh weather and terrain in their quest for mobility. Americans have always loved the open roads and the rough weather never stopped them from their quest to go to impossible places and rarified heights.

                                            

Immigrants Should Make America Better, Not Worse

Corey Stewart, PWC Chairman
Wikipedia photo

Prince William County Chairman, Corey Stewart, Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, said during a press conference, “On behalf of the Board of Supervisors of Prince William County, I’m requesting the Trump administration to identify, detain and remove the 7,500 criminal illegal aliens that we have handed over to ICE over the past 10 years.” According to Stewart, the criminal aliens were handed over by local law enforcement to ICE under a program called 287g. “Of the 7,500, 1,000 have been rearrested.”

A mob of protesters stormed the board meeting on Tuesday, carrying signs in Spanish and English that it did not matter where or how you came from, we are all immigrants and we are all Americans. Speakers who advocate open borders argued that those arrested had not committed a crime and should not have been detained. http://wjla.com/news/local/prince-william-county-residents-speak-out-against-immigration-proposal

The fact that illegal aliens crossed into our country without visas and proper documentation is a crime. The last U.S. Census attributed the large population increase in Prince William County mostly to the illegal alien migration to the county.

Fredy Burgos, a Republican Party activist, posts regularly on Facebook examples of crimes committed daily by illegal aliens in Prince William County. Despite the protesters’ claims that illegals do not commit crimes, reality and police records speak otherwise.

In addition to illegals, counties in Virginia have to deal with the middle of the night surprise of forced resettlement of refugees in small communities that are ill-prepared to handle the influx of uneducated, illiterate, third world individuals who have no skills, do not speak our language, are often unwilling to learn it, do not understand our culture, do not accept it, do not share our religious values, and do not respect nor recognize our Constitution.

Legal immigrants throughout history have made America better by assimilating into one culture, the American culture. Back then there was no welfare state and no welfare generosity and dependency. But today’s immigrants are often here for economic benefits, welfare, and social security thanks to the leftist Open Borders policy. There is no economic boom to struggling communities who are forced to accept such refugees or close their eyes at the massive influx of illegals. In their media-driven narrative, leftists conveniently leave out the cost of welfare use, education of their children, and criminal justice system costs that counties incur in dealing with illegal aliens and refugees.

Looking at just one program, SNAP (food stamps), of the refugees who arrived in 2015, 92.5 percent received food stamps and, of those admitted in 2011, a whopping 60 percent are still receiving SNAP today. Take a trip in northern Virginia to Walmart on the days that SNAP benefits are distributed, and you will see a mass of illegal humanity, speaking languages other than English and wearing burkas and other ethnic costumes. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/arc_15_final_508.pdf

Our great-grandfathers had arrived here for the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families or future families. They had to go through Ellis Island, weeks of quarantine for infectious diseases, and some were even turned away because we wanted to keep the American public safe. And those immigrants, who cleared Ellis Island, worked very hard, built railroads, ports, tunnels, bridges, dams, roads, parks, highways, interstates, skyscrapers, and entire cities. As my good and patriotic Virginian friend had suggested, there should be “no immigration without verification and assimilation.”

Repealing the Open Borders mentality is essential. Becoming a U.S. citizen is a privilege, not a given right. Immigrants should benefit America in some way by bringing in skills and trades that are helpful in strengthening America. Immigrants must be an asset to our country, not a liability. Nobody should become a burden by drawing from our welfare system and from our social security funds built up by American workers who contributed with every paycheck into these funds. Taking social security funds without contributing to them is theft from the American people.

Given all the violent Islamist attacks on American citizens in the last years, we cannot afford to trust blindly, we must verify immigrants’ ulterior motives. “Can they prove that they are who they say they are? Can they prove that they are not criminal? What is their intent in becoming an American?”

Even though leftists claim that the demand to assimilate is “fascistic,” assimilation is necessary for numerous reasons:

1.       Do the potential immigrants’ world views match the views of our founding documents?

2.       Do potential immigrants intend to become Americans, or are they just drawing financial benefits, taking advantage of our American compassionate nature and generosity?

3.       Will they protect and defend the Constitution and support American independence and sovereignty?

4.       As Dr. Savage says, will they support our “language, borders, and culture?”

5.       Are they interested in subverting America’s power, authority, and institutions with the intent of dividing our great nation?

6.       Do they understand what it takes to be an American?

7.       Do they want to be productive citizens?

We stand with legal immigrants who came before us and with those millions who are still awaiting the disposition of their backlogged files, immigrants who want to come to the United States legally, but live too far away. To now skip them and instead allow law breakers, border jumpers, and fence climbers to become American citizens is a slap in the face of every formerly legal resident alien who became naturalized American citizens after waiting years and years, meandering through legal hoops, learning history and civics, passing citizenship readiness tests, proving that they have what it takes to become an American, a privilege earned, not a right.

America welcomes legal immigrants with open arms and generosity but, if there is ever any doubt, after proper and thorough vetting, then, as my Virginian friend had suggested, “when in doubt, leave them out,” they don’t have what it takes to become an American.

 

The Snow of My Childhood

Ploiesti buried under snow in 2017
Photo: Florentina A. 

The first snow of 2017 finally arrived; a couple of inches covered the ground early before sunrise, turning our world into a powdery-white winter wonderland. The woods were unusually quiet and the animals disappeared with the exception of the resident fox. She ran from the back bushes and left a trail of swirling dry snow disturbed by her bushy tail. My two squirrels were nowhere to be seen.

I was planning to go to an Epiphany celebration that morning and was not sure if I could drive on unplowed roads in our neighborhood. The main highways were clear; this time nothing was left to chance, plows and salt trucks were in position the night before. They were not going to repeat last year’s fiasco when a few inches of snow on untreated roads caused gridlock on all major highways and interstates for hours in northern Virginia. I was stuck on a hill top with many others for six hours before we were rescued.

I made it to my friend’s beautiful mansion, perched on the top of a hill and I parked on an incline without fear. The snow had stopped, how hard would it be to maneuver the car going home?

An hour and a half later, I did not like what I saw. The snow was coming down hard again, covering everything with a fresh, thick blanket.  As I looked out the window in the back yard at Denise’s two pink flamingos covered in inches of snow, my mind wondered to my childhood’s snow, a world away on the other side of the globe, in another time, another life, not so abundant as today.

Our winters were always very heavy, icy, and bitter cold. When it snowed, we stayed snowed in for months in the country unless God was merciful and temperatures rose for a few days. Then it snowed again on top of ice.  The city plowed the main roads for buses and trams, but side streets were always buried deeply. The main streets had snow piled up so high on the sides; we could not see the heads of the people walking between the mountains of snow. Boulevards and avenues were covered in dirty slush, splashed with vengeance onto everything.

I am not sure how much the many falls on sheer ice have affected the intense pain I have today, I just remember the constant bruises on my legs and butt. I was fortunate to have never broken a bone, but many of my friends were not so lucky.

To us kids, winter was a time of fun, sledding, building snow men, snow ball fights, and ice skating, but for adults it was a time of misery - walking, commuting, and working in bitter cold. For the elites, who had chauffeurs and their own cars, it was a time of skiing and partying in the beautiful mountainous lodges and expensive hotels of beautiful Sinaia resort.

Growing up with my grandparents in the country, snow was something entirely different than in the city. It created a lot of extra chores in order to survive. Nobody came to plow the roads and the bus arrived often only once a day if it did not get stuck on the way. Once in the village, even though it was only six miles away from the city, you were stuck for the winter.

We had to care for animals every day, feed them, water them, and make sure they did not freeze to death. My grandparents’ four bedroom house did not have heat, nor a bathroom, so they built a tiny adobe, mud and straw brick, three-room structure nearby and that is where we survived in winter.

The first room was where we cooked the meals on the cast iron stove which was fed with chopped wood and sent heat to the adjoining room where Grandma Elena and I slept. Grandpa Cristache’s bed was not far from the stove and as such, he got up every morning and restarted the fire which had died during the night. We did not freeze because we had really thick and heavy wool quilted comforters stuffed with cotton which kept us toasty warm. As soon as we stepped out of bed, it was very cold.

A third room had a separate entrance and was used as a summer kitchen and that is where we ate our meals as well. It was warmed by a butane gas stove on which grandma cooked our meals and the slop for the pig.

The wooden outhouse was located in the garden, as far away from the house as possible, and we had to trek through mud and snow to use it. It was just a wood shack over a hole in the ground. The toilet paper was pages from the main communist newspaper, Scinteia (the spark), with Ceausescu’s brain-numbing lying speeches. It gave adults a sort of perverse and guilty pleasure to use his printed face on our behinds.

Grandma felt sorry for me, a “city girl,” where we had indoor plumbing and a bathroom. But I spent more time with them growing up and on school vacations than in the city. Besides, the commies did not give us hot water often in winter and in summer they even cut off cold water in order to clean and maintain their holding containers of rust and minerals or to conserve resources. So Grandma brought in a bucket at night so I did not have to go to the outhouse to pee; she did not want me to trip in the dark and fall on ice or snow.

At night, she gave me a clean and warm flannel pajama, painfully washed by her ageing hands and dried on the line, clean but smelling like wet dog. We slept cozy warm until the fire in the stove died out and the crackling of burning wood stopped. As soon as we hit the sack, flees woke up and started biting but we were too tired and cold to care. Grandma always fed many flee-infested cats that slept in the attic, in hope that they would control the mouse population. We could hear the mice at night running through the tunnels they dug inside the adobe walls, probably going up to where hay and grain was stored. When we got up in the morning, bleary eyed and shivering, we waited for Grandpa to stoke the fire again before we crawled out of bed. Our pajamas and nightgowns bore bloody witnesses to the many flea bites we got during the night. Grandma tried to treat the cats with a flea powder, probably DDT, but fleas became hardy, they always came back.

Every morning we had to boil water to start the frozen pump outside which gave us water. It would freeze so hard, we had to boil a couple of pots before we could break the ice and start pumping water again for our own use and for the animals.

I remember thinking that I never wanted to be a farm girl, to live in the country, because life was too harsh, frigid, and miserable. And there were so many chores that a child like me could not understand.  Life was hard, no radio, no TV, and no electricity, we used a kerosene lamp with a wick and a fluted clear glass globe.

I can never understand to this day how my Grandfather bicycled to work nine kilometers each way in heavy snow for four decades. He was in good health but, when he developed a hernia and needed an operation, they nicked his colon during surgery. Ceausescu’s communist surgeons were ill prepared to care for the proletariat and nobody was concerned when most of them either died on the operating table or later from infection from a botched procedure. When I was seventeen, my beloved Grandpa, who taught me so much history, told me so many stories, and guided my first seven formative years of my life, died a horrible death from gangrene.

Village kids seldom had time to have fun in the snow – there were too many chores. But once in a while, around the holidays, they went from door to door, pulling a sleigh in the snow, decorated with a pine tree with colorful crepe paper garlands, singing about Father Frost and wishing the residents health and happiness in the New Year.

The snow turned red at Christmas with the blood of slaughtered pigs, a generational tradition passed for centuries. We were not allowed to eat meat unless we watched the animal being killed. I always hated that because domesticated animals were my pets. As I watered and fed them, I talked to them as if they were human and petted them. They responded in kind with affection, following me around the yard.

And here I am today, in this beautiful home, surrounded by freshly fallen powdery snow, so far away from where I came, wishing once more that I could travel back in time to my childhood snow, my grandparents, and my roots.

Florentina's Yard 2017


 

I regretfully left, struggling to control the car in the driving snow, and, when I got home, my cousin had sent some photos of the snow they got in my hometown of Ploiesti. It was just as I had remembered it. I gazed through teary eyes at the image of roads and fenced yards totally submerged by un-shoveled tall and pristine snow and I wished that I was an oblivious and blissful child again.
Note: A video of the 1966 winter in Bucharest.
 https://www.facebook.com/BucurestiulSecret/videos/935231383279607/

Would President Trump Fix the "Broken" Immigration?

We keep hearing that our current immigration system is broken and it must be overhauled to better serve the immigrants, especially the illegal ones. And in this process, it seems that immigration, whether legal or illegal, is not necessarily run in the best interest of the American people, but in the best interest of crony capitalists and the ruling elites.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency with the Department of Homeland Security, was created in 2002 and assumed its functions on March 1, 2003, as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. USCIS has over 200 offices around the world and staffs 19,000 employees and contractors in four directorates and nine program offices. Applications are processed in four major USCIS Service Centers and 83 Field Offices in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Funding USCIS operations largely from user fees, less than 4 percent of its FY2014 budget came from Congressional appropriations. According to William A. Kandel, writing in a Congressional Service Report in May 2015, $124 million USCIS funding came from direct congressional appropriations and $3.097 billion came from user fees in 2014. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R44038.pdf

Over twenty years ago, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was transformed by creating the Immigration Examinations Fee Account (IEFA) in 1988 to fund the agency’s activities. “The agency has two other small accounts that were created to support specific purposes both within and outside USCIS: the H-1B Non-Immigrant Petitioner Fee Account; and the H-1B Fraud Prevention and Detection Fee Account.”

When DHS receives its annual funding, USCIS also receives its direct appropriations. In previous years, Congress also funded special projects through direct appropriations such as backlog reduction. In recent years, according to CRS, appropriations have exclusively funded E-Verify and immigrant integration grants. E-Verify is a system that electronically confirms if individuals have proper authorization to work in the United States.

INS was legally allowed to charge fees for immigration services even before the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA). When the Immigration Examinations Fee Account (IEFA) was created, USCIS collected most of its budget from user fees, and its budget was no longer subject to annual congressional approval. Congress has little or no influence on our immigration policies and enforcement.

Our President issued on November 20, 2014 the Immigration Accountability Executive Action which included provisions such as an expansion of the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program started in 2012, and the new Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program that “grants certain unauthorized aliens protection from removal, and work authorization, for three years.”

Applicants submit petitions and pay user fees to USCIS which “would purportedly pay for the cost of administering the program.” This executive action benefited 5 million unauthorized aliens living in the United States. “The deferred action programs of the President’s executive action have been temporarily enjoined.”

Some Congressmen, reflecting the wishes of their constituents, oppose deferred action programs but have little or no options to stop the programs using the annual funding process. They cannot control an agency which is largely independent of Congress. To change this situation, an enactment of law would be required which Congress does not seem interested in pursuing, as the illegal immigration debacle continues unabated despite the recent violent attacks in Paris by “refugees” from Syria and elsewhere who were allowed into EU unrestricted.

While some are happy that USCIS reduces the burden of cost to American taxpayers, others are concerned over the lack of congressional oversight on its activities and its lack of accountability to Congress.

Additional potential issues include the level of fees that may prevent potential applicants from seeking benefits or deter lawful permanent residents from becoming citizens; the pace and progress of information technology modernization may not serve legal petitioners efficiently, causing huge backlogs of 4 million legal applications; and the inability of Congress to oversee the adequacy of personnel management and resources.

With the leading purpose of processing immigrant petitions, USCIS handled in 2014 six million petitions for immigration-related services and benefits. USCIS performs other functions:

-          Adjudication of immigration and naturalization petitions

-          Refugee and asylum claims and related humanitarian and international concerns

-          Immigration-related services such as issuing employment authorizations

-          Petitions of nonimmigrant change-of-status

“Humanitarian functions have no associated fee” but the following do levy user fees:

-          Immigration adjudication

Of the 6 million petitions processed each year, 1 million are for permanent status and 5 million are for temporary non-immigrant status; adjudicators determine if immediate relatives and family members of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent resident (LPRs) are eligible; if employees U.S. businesses demonstrate they are needed and no other Americans are available; they also determine if foreign nationals on a temporary visa are eligible to change to another non-immigrant status or LPR status

-          Work authorization

Screens aliens for work under certain conditions

-          Employment verification

Checks lawful status to work in the United States (since FY2007, congressional appropriations have funded the E-Verify)

-          International Services

USCIS Office of International Affairs “adjudicates refugee applications and conducts background and record checks related to some immigrant petitions abroad;” a component of this program is the asylum officer corps who interview and screen asylum applicants; according to USCIS, “a person seeking asylum is applying for protection from persecution for the same reasons as a refugee but, unlike a refugee, is present in the United States”

-          Fraud Detection and National Security

This office flags applications and petitions that trigger national security and criminal database notifications; such duties, formerly performed by INS enforcement, are now under the responsibility of DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

-          Civic Integration

Instructing and training on citizenship rights and responsibilities via a Citizenship Resource Center website and via the Immigrant Integration Grants Program “which assists public or private nonprofit organizations that provide citizenship instruction and naturalization application services to LPRs

-          Naturalization

Granting U.S. citizenship to LPRs; adjudicators must check if aliens have continuously resided in the U.S. for a specific period of time, have good moral character, are able to read, write, speak, and understand English, and have a basic knowledge of U.S. civic and history;

Do unsavory characters who are not worthy of American citizenship or of refugee status slip through the adjudication process? Of course they do, the terrorist Tsernaev brothers come to mind.

One of the biggest criticisms of USCIS is that petitions are still processed in the “outmoded” paper form and there are constant complaints of lost files. Since 2008 USCIS has embarked on IT Modernization and Client Services in order to “improve information sharing, workload capacity, and system integrity.” Eventually the system will be “paperless, centralized, and consolidated, ensuring national security and integrity, customer service, operational efficiency, and quality in immigration benefit decisions.” (Fiscal Year 2016 Congressional Budget Justifications, p. 3357)

Since Congress is so weak and unwilling to protect our borders, our American interests, and our sovereignty, would a President Trump be ready to use his executive pen to stop the flood of illegal immigrants by building a fence, enforcing current immigration laws, and deporting criminal illegal aliens?

 

 

"Engineering" Climate Change

Ice formations. Photo: Jeremy Smith, 2014

 

 

Our omniscient government is going to spend $1 billion in addition to the billions already wasted so far in order to attempt the impossible, “engineering” climate change to satisfy the Green agenda.

What is the scientific, measurable definition of a “normal” climate change and what is the measuring stick used to determine acceptable variability?  What are the parameters of deciding “normal” and what makes the global warming crowd the soothsayers of climate, especially since they’ve been wrong in their predictions in the last fifty years? Can the Green Agendders describe a “normal” climate change?

The global warming scheme became a very profitable enterprise, a veritable cash cow, until people started asking questions, and Mother Nature froze in thick Arctic ice the scientists’ vessel on their global warming ice-melting fact-finding mission, or dumped unusual amounts of snow every time environmentalists gathered to protest global warming. Returning to the drawing boards, the liberal euphemists came up with a different explanation, Polar Vortex, and the profitable enterprise called global warming became climate change.

It is the same climate change our planet has been experiencing for millions of years called seasons. The seasons caused by the yearly revolution of the earth around the Sun and tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to the plane of revolution.

Singling out oil and coal companies, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a crowd in Jakarta on February 16, 2014 that “In a sense, climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”  He called climate change skeptics adherents to shoddy science and Flat Earthers. “We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.”

The solution he proposes is a “new global energy policy that shifts reliance from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies” like the one championed by President Barak Obama recently in California.

The problem is not that people deny the existence of climate change. Most people agree that there is a climate change but they deny that it is man-made. There are now over 1,000 real scientists and climatologists that agree that global warming is a hoax. The scientific evidence provided from the left to support global warming is based on “consensus.”  Consensus does not constitute scientific fact. It just means that a group of people are in agreement on a particular issue. The MSM is not interested in hearing or airing any opposing views, marginalizing, intimidating, and suing anybody who disagrees with them. They have decided that it is settled science and that is the end of the conversation, case closed.

The “engineering” of climate change by government fiat, executive orders, taxation, and EPA regulations reminds me of Don Quixote de la Mancha “tilting at the windmills,” an English idiom sometimes used to mean jousting  (the windmills), “attacking an imaginary enemy.”

The consensus argument is that “climate change is real and human activity is playing a major role in an increasingly volatile climate.” The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming that humans are producing more CO2 is just a hypothesis that has been debunked. Even EPA Director Gina McCarthy said that reaching all U.S. goals for climate change compliance, “will not have an impact globally. You don’t make good, sustainable laws when you make them on unproven sciences.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the “repository of the global warming hoax.” Consensus scientists engage in political advocacy and economic restructuring of the developed world.

As the data scandal from the University of East Anglia proved, there has been serious damage done to climate science, real research, and industrial progress by United Nation’s 30-year “green agenda’s” war on fossil fuels and economic development. IPCC, which is not a scientific organization and is not accountable to any nation or group of nations, has influenced the masses to believe that climate change is anthropogenic (man-made).

What could possibly go wrong with the Green Agenda, the War on Coal, EPA strangling industry with costly and unnecessary regulations, and spending billions of taxpayer dollars on expensive renewable energy such as wind and solar?

-          Utilities are struggling to meet the demand for electricity due to cold weather

-          The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule by EPA put such a financial pressure on the coal sector that many plants were retired

-          After billions of dollars were invested in renewable energy resources, there is not enough solar and wind energy generated to replace the electricity that was generated by now closed coal power plants:

37 percent of electricity generated in 2012 came from coal fired plants; in 2008, 49 percent of electricity came from coal fired plants, a sizeable drop of 12 percent; natural gas fired plants replaced some of the electricity; solar power generated only 0.1 percent of electricity needed, and renewable energy, including hydro-electric produced only 5 percent of that total electricity production (U.S. Energy Information Agency or EIA)

EIA reports 3 percent loss in 2012 of coal fired capacity and by 2020 20 percent of electricity generation from coal will be lost due mostly to EPA regulations (Rick Manning, Americans for Limited Government)

-          The world’s largest generating plant (5 square miles) Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, located in the Mojave Desert near the California/Nevada border, scorches, burns, or singes birds flying into the 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit “thermal flux” around the towers. The 350,000 huge mirrors were killing birds even during the construction stage of the facility. Birds also mistaken the mirrors for water and fly directly into them. The mirrors and towers are used to store heat and to keep generating electricity after the sun goes down.

Ivanpah’s electricity cost about four times as much as electricity generated by natural gas-fired plants but produces far less electricity, not to mention the amount of land required to install the mirrors. The much larger cost will be passed on to consumers.   

A kWh of electricity generated at Ivanpah, if you take into account the price tag of the facility ($2.2 billion), cost $5,561. However, since the plant produces electricity 8-10 hours per day, the cost goes up by a factor of three, making the cost per kWh jump to the “bargain” price of $15,000!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560494/Worlds-largest-solar-farm-SCORCHING-BIRDS-fly-it.html

-          Wind turbines kill 70 Golden Eagles each year at California’s Altamont Pass http://www.theblaze.com/stories/wind-energy-under-attack-for-thousands-of-wildlife deaths/

-          U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Estimated that 440,000 birds per year were killed by U.S. wind turbines http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/collisions/wind_farms.html

-          Study showed 600,000 bats killed by wind turbines in 2012 http://cbsnews.com/news/about-600,000-bats-killed-by-wind-turbines-in-2012-study-shows/

-          President Obama issued executive order to triple government’s renewable energy use by 2020 http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/12/oh-by-the-way-obama-issues-executive-order-to-triple-governments-renewable-energy-usage-by-2020/

-          Department of Energy gave Green Energy loans to President Obama backers http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/12/new-doe-loans-support-green-obama-backers/

-          Department of Interior explores expansion of permits to kill Bald Eagles in order to accommodate wind energy

-          http://blog.heritage.org/2012/05/09/interior-looks-to-expand-permits-for-killing-bald-eagles-to-accommodate-wind-energy/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FoundryConservativePolicyNews+%28The+Foundry%3A+Conservative+Policy+News.%29

-          The administration excuses wind farms on Bald Eagle deaths but prosecutes oil companies

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/14/obama-administration-gives-wind-farms-pass-on-eagle-deaths-prosecutes-oil/?test=latestnews

-          US gives permits to kill Bald Eagles to wind power providers  http://news.yahoo.com/wind-power-us-extends-permit-eagle-deaths-145931345--finance.html

-          Wind farms killed 67 Bald Eagles in 5 years, a slaughter by any measure http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/11/eagle-slaughter-wind-farms-kill-67-eagles-5-years/

-          Fifty administration-backed Green Energy companies went bankrupt or were failing http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/30/as-many-as-fifty-obama-backed-green-energy-companies-bankrupt-or-troubled/

The Green Agenda cost many California farmers their livelihood and American consumers a large supply of food when the government shut off the water in St. Joaquin Valley to save the Delta smelt, a bait fish that nobody really cared to save. It was not climate change that caused the drought in California – the drought was “exacerbated by federal and state regulations,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca), which positioned “the well-being of fish… ahead of the well-being of communities.”

While blaming this man-made drought on climate change, President Obama promised $160 million in federal aid, $100 million to livestock farmers, $60 million to California food banks, and $15 million to the hardest hit areas. For the past five years, environmental groups were successful in diverting water from farmers in order to save the Delta smelt, flushing into the ocean 3 million acre-feet of water slated for the Central Valley.

The House Bill 3964 to restore water to the area passed by 229-191 votes. The Democrats are holding up the bill in the Senate because the administration is not really interested in passing it. Instead, they are giving more “pork to environmental activists and their victims, offering the farmers they’ve put out of work, a “summer meal plan.”

Preaching global warming and the climate change agenda are more important than a long-term solution for the man-made water shortages that are affecting the $45 billion agricultural industry. These water shortages could be easily resolved, but the government’s solution is to spend $2 billion in a temporary “relief” package that will not solve the long-term problem.

At the end of the day, crony capitalism and environmental interest groups drive the climate change agenda. Their “consensus” political groups and scientists are pressured to tailor climate models to ensure the desired results that confirm man-made global warming. The solar flares, the sun’s orbit, its tilt, the cosmic radiation, the oceanic currents, the fast dissipating cloud cover, volcanic activity, and other natural causes are not considered as variables in the climate change models.