Excitable Adam Schiff Is Very Concerned Over Intelligence Politicization or Something

By William Teach June 1, 2019 – 3:40 pm

Hey, remember when he used to want all the information to be put out? Good times

House Intelligence chief warns spy agencies of Trump ‘politicization’

U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Friday warned the FBI and U.S. spy agencies that President Donald Trump is trying to “politicize” U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.

Schiff criticized Trump for giving Attorney General William Barr “sweeping” powers to declassify or downgrade the secrecy of government reporting while conducting what the Justice Department is calling a “review” of “intelligence activities” related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

In letters to agency heads, Schiff said May 23 orders from Trump telling them to help with Barr’s review was “an effort by the President and the Attorney General to politicize the IC (intelligence community) and law enforcement, to deligitimize a well-founded investigation into the President, and to attack the President’s political enemies.”

Schiff sent his letters, which Reuters saw, to the directors of National Intelligence, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency.

He asked them to keep his panel informed about Barr’s review; provide documents produced for it; and tell the committee about any moves by Barr to declassify material over agency objections.

In other words, he’s concerned like hell that the whole Russia Russia Russia thing will backfire on his Party, and he wants to find some talking points scapegoats for when the reality is exposed in the months to come, and the 1 1/2 till the general election

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If All You See…

By William Teach June 1, 2019 – 1:00 pm

…is a world drying out from carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Maggie’s Farm, with a post wondering if it’s the government’s job to make us happy.

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Extinction Rebellion Considers Using Drones To Shut Down Heathrow Airport

By William Teach June 1, 2019 – 11:29 am

This wouldn’t put too many people’s lives at risk, right?

Extinction Rebellion considers using drones to shut London’s Heathrow Airport

Climate activists from Extinction Rebellion have drawn up plans to use drones to shut London’s Heathrow Airport this summer in a campaign to stop the construction of a third runway at Europe’s busiest airport, the group said.

The internal proposal, seen by Reuters, emerged against a backdrop of renewed campaigning by environmental groups who argue that expanding Heathrow would be incompatible with Britain’s targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“On June 18, we plan to carry out nonviolent direct action to ensure Heathrow Authorities close the airport for the day, to create a ‘pause’ in recognition of the genocidal impact of high carbon activities, such as flying, upon the natural world,” Extinction Rebellion said in a statement late on Thursday.

“This is not about targeting the public, but holding the Government to their duty to take leadership on the climate and ecological emergency,” the group said.

No, it’s pretty much targeting the public, because that’s who would be affected the most. People who can’t fly to their meetings and vacations.

Heathrow Airport said the use of drones would be a “reckless action.”

“We agree with the need to act on climate change, but that requires us to work together constructively — not commit serious criminal offenses just as hardworking people prepare to spend a well-earned holiday with their family and friends,” an airport spokesman said in a statement on Friday.

At this point, Extinction Rebellion is sounding like a terrorist group

In the internal proposal written by volunteers, activists suggested using drones to force authorities to ground flights at Heathrow Airport while other protesters held picnics. The activists said they would avoid any risk to aircraft by informing the airport of their plans in advance.

If the government does not cede to their demands after disruption on June 18, the activists proposed shutting the airport for the first two weeks in July.

Right there is something called “extortion.” It’s rather surprising the OK government has picked up ER members over this already, considering how the government jumps into action over mean tweets and Facebook posts. The government has sort of responded

Several hours after the demonstration was announced on Friday, aviation minister Baroness Vere issued a stark warning that culprits will face “the full force of the law”.

The Metropolitan Police has also said it will develop “strong plans” to counter the group, which brought parts of London to a standstill during two weeks of demonstrations in April.

What happens when a plane taking off or landing hits a drone? What then, ER?

I wonder what the genocidal carbon footprint is of all those clothes imported from around the world?

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Orange County Wants A Tax Increase To Help Stop ‘Climate Change’

By William Teach June 1, 2019 – 7:33 am

Strange how this always seems to involve tax increases, instead of Believers practicing what they preach

Commissioner proposes tax increase to help Orange County meet its climate-change goals

Climate change is at a crisis point, Commissioner Mark Marcoplos says, and Orange County could mount a faster response with the extra money from a quarter-cent increase in the property tax rate.

“I’ve just been thinking about it and thinking about it, and suddenly, I thought, you know, this is serious business,” Marcoplos said. “We need to do something that requires a little bit of a sacrifice to put some serious money into battling climate change.”

The county has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% by 2025, and also to make the switch to a 100% renewable energy-based economy by 2050. Marcoplos included a list of projects that potentially could help meet those goals in his proposal.

Marcoplos’ proposed increase of 0.25-cent per $100 of assessed property value would be on top of a planned tax rate increase the county manager has proposed to help pay for operations and debt. The commissioners could approve a final tax rate increase June 11.

County Manager Bonnie Hammersley already has recommended a 1.5-cent tax rate increase this year, and possibly more increases through 2022, totaling 9.13 cents. The commissioners could also raise the tax rate by 5.8 cents now and bank the additional money for future debt payments.

A 1.5-cent increase would make the county’s tax rate 86.54 cents per $100 in property value. The owner of a $300,000 home would pay a $2,596.20 property tax bill, roughly $45 more than the current bill.

Marcoplos’s proposed 0.25-cent tax rate increase would add $7.50 to the tax bill for that $300,000 property.

It may not seem like much, but you start adding this increase into all the other cost of living increases, and it starts adding up. Further, why burden just property owners? These same people would melt down if you said that only property owners should be given a vote. Why not spread the tax around to everyone? Especially since this is an extremely liberal county. It went overwhelmingly for Hillary, Obama twice, Kerry, and Gore, thinking back through this century. It wasn’t even close. Orange County is where Chapel Hill resides.

So, why do they need a tax increase? If 74% of the residents were Hillary voters (only 1 county had higher support, Durham, which is right next to Orange), one would think they could give up their own use of fossil fuels and make their lives carbon neutral, right?

He takes the property tax rate “very seriously,” Marcoplos said, but his proposed increase is a small price to pay for practical solutions to “a planetary crisis” that experts say may cause irreversible damage in 10 to 12 years.

“We’re not just throwing money away to get some mysterious climate change benefit,” he added. “There are economic benefits, creating jobs, putting money in people’s pockets with weatherization (savings), the energy savings. Right now, alternative energy is roughly equal to grid energy in cost, and it is getting more and more cost effective.”

Sounds like more of an excuse to take more money from citizens.

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DOJ To Launch Anti-Trust Investigation Into Google

By William Teach June 1, 2019 – 7:12 am

If this report is to be believed, and, it is propagating across the media, it could get very interesting

Justice Dept preparing to launch antitrust investigation into Google: report

The Justice Department is preparing to conduct an antitrust investigation into Google, a move that could increase scrutiny on the tech giant.

People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that the agency’s antitrust division has spent recent weeks laying the foundation for the probe.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which shares the department’s antitrust jurisdiction, conducted an antitrust probe into Google in 2013 into whether its business practices threatened competitors, but it declined to take any punitive action.

Sources told the Journal that the FTC agreed to allow the Justice Department to oversee the upcoming inquiry, which will likely probe Google’s business practices.

The question is whether Google is breaking American anti-trust laws. They’ve supposedly broke EU ones

(Breitbart) Breitbart News reported in March of this year that Silicon Valley giant Google has been fined $1.7 billion by the European Union for the company’s third breach of E.U. antitrust laws in three years. The latest fine against the company relates to Google’s AdSense advertising service and “illegal practices in search advertising brokering to cement its dominant market position,” according to European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

It should be interesting when Democrat groups, those running for president, and those in Congress start coming out in favor of this Big Company.

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More Chicago Schools Freaking Over Circle Game Photos

By William Teach May 31, 2019 – 4:20 pm

I mentioned a different Chicago school the other day. It’s almost like the kids are, get this, playing a game, not virulent white supremacists

‘Circle game’ gestures found in Oak Park middle schools’ yearbook photos

Oak Park District 97 officials are discussing their next steps after finding photos of students making the “circle game” hand gesture were found in both of its middle schools’ yearbooks.

A May 29 letter sent to families by Brooks Middle School Principal April Capuder and Julian Middle School Principal Todd Fitzgerald confirmed images showing students using the upside-down “OK” hand gesture were printed in both sets of yearbooks.

The discovery comes the same month Oak Park and River Forest High School chose to spend more than $53,000 to reprint about 1,750 student yearbooks after photos of students making similar gestures were found.

The hand gesture, commonly referred to as the “circle game,” began as part of a juvenile “made-you-look” game, but has been appropriated in recent years by white supremacists.

The article even mentions later that it was a joke to punk the media. Looks like it’s still working.

Another Chicago-area high school will reprint yearbooks because of ‘OK’ sign photo controversy

The “circle game” has turned into an end-of-year headache for Chicago’s Walter Payton College Prep, which is paying more than $22,000 to reprint yearbooks without photographs of students making a hand sign that has been co-opted by white supremacists.

In the game, people flash the “OK” sign below the waist and try to get others to look.

“Our school resources and official publication will not be the home to symbology that is now being associated with white supremacy,” Principal Tim Devine wrote in a letter sent Wednesday to students, faculty and parents. “It is repugnant and odious and has no place at all in our Payton, American, and world communities.”

This article, also by the Chicago Tribune, fails to mention the 4Chan joke. Which, again, is working, as Devine goes on to lose his mind over kids playing a game.

Funny, the same people had no problem when Black Lives Matter were throwing up black power signs and saying black supremacist things for real.

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If All You See…

By William Teach May 31, 2019 – 1:00 pm

…is an evil fossil fueled vehicle, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Legal Insurrection, with a post on yet another nutty college course on “whiteness”.

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Good News: The New Godzilla Movie Is All About ‘Climate Change’

By William Teach May 31, 2019 – 10:30 am

Stuff like this guarantees the movie to not do well at the box office (and it still doesn’t prove anthropogenic causation)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is an unlikely climate change movie

There’s an ostensible comic relief moment in Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters that accidentally recalls weather notices in today’s headlines. “Bad news,” declares a member of Monarch, the crypto-zoological agency formed to monitor the activity and habits of giant monsters around the globe. “You can just call it news,” replies chief warrant officer Jackson Barnes (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) with a defeated pout. “It’s always bad.”

The reptilian colossus Godzilla was originally conceived by Tomoyuki Tanaka, Ishirō Honda, and Eiji Tsubaraya as a nuclear-powered bugbear; Honda’s 1954 Godzilla film reflects Japan’s acute fear of atomic obliteration, a shared cultural terror rooted in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on August 6, 1945. In the 65 years since Godzilla introduced the radioactive behemoth to the world, he has gradually evolved from antagonist to eco-hero. Where Honda’s original film taps into Japan’s national trauma to give form to nuclear devastation, Dougherty’s film recalls America’s present-day anxieties over increasingly intense weather patterns tearing across the country from coast to coast. Tornadoes are tearing across Indiana to Ohio; temperatures are rising to 100 degrees in Jacksonville, Atlanta, Savannah, Macon, all the way up to Charlottesville, a high for the season; parts of Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas remain under flood watches. Last year, wildfires raged over northern California, taking a $3 billion toll on its inhabitants. Climate change, 2019’s collective boogeyman, is the monster whose name everyone knows but whose existence not everyone accepts.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters couches climate change fears in egomaniacal ignorance. Alan Jonah (Charles Dance), an embittered ex-Britishy Army colonel and determined misanthrope, foolishly believes humans have set Earth on a collision course with extinction, and that freeing the “Titans” — including King Ghidorah, the three-headed alien dragon serving as the film’s villain — will tip the scales in the planet’s favor. He and his team of eco-terrorists seek out the hidden locations of slumbering behemoths, wake them up, and set them loose on the world. Enter Godzilla, cranky at being disturbed from his long rest — he’s been MIA in the five years since the release of Gareth Edward’s Godzilla — and ready to rumble. Jonah convinces Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), one of Monarch’s paleobiologists, of his perspective; the film proves them woefully offbase. Only Godzilla can tip those scales by kicking monster butt.

This continues the long-established characterization of Godzilla as a force of nature; when Earth’s natural balance is thrown out of whack, Godzilla emerges from the depths to set things right by roasting foes with his atomic breath, incurring billions of dollars in property damage in the process. Of course, sending in a monster to contain a monster is an extreme answer to an extreme problem. A positive outcome still means countless lives lost, homes and businesses reduced to rubble and ash, and iconic baseball stadiums left smushed into pavement. When the ruckus ends and mankind’s monster triumphs, the damage has already been done. It’s hard to call that a victory. In its extravagant way, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, pleads for environmental stewardship: Jackson’s “bad news” line isn’t a throwaway but a sober acknowledgement. Weather reports are rarely good. In fact, they’re usually dangerous.

It really doesn’t get any better than that in the following paragraphs. In fact, it gets worse. Nutjobs, just complete nutjobs.

Can’t we just get a good movie without a Message anymore?

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Colorado Gov Polis Signs All Sorts Of ‘Climate Change’ Bills Or Something

By William Teach May 31, 2019 – 8:35 am

There’s a couple interesting things with this. First, it will be fun when the citizens of Colorado realize how many problems this causes in their lives, from a cost of living increase to a problem with acquiring certain appliances. Second, almost no one is covering this. It is mostly a Colorado state story. You’d think this would be big nationally

Polis Signs Colorado Climate Action Plan, Other Key Energy Bills

For more than thirty years, even as scientists issued increasingly dire warnings about the urgent need to tackle climate change, Colorado, like many states, has not only failed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, but those emissions continued to rise to ever more dangerous levels. A slate of climate and energy legislation just signed into law by Governor Jared Polis aims to finally change that.

“This is about the health of our planet,” said Polis at a bill-signing ceremony today, May 30, at the JeffCo Community Solar Garden in Arvada. “Particularly in a state with climate-dependent industries like agriculture and the skiing industry, it’s important that we show leadership.”

The bills signed into law included House Bill 1261, the centerpiece of Democrats’ efforts to strengthen Colorado climate policy at the legislature this year. Dubbed the Climate Action Plan, the bill commits the state to a series of greenhouse gas emissions reductions, including a 50 percent cut by 2030 and a 90 percent cut by 2050. (big snip)

Some of the other bills Polis signed today are designed to kick-start progress on other fronts. House Bill 1231 will implement new efficiency standards for many household appliances, while House Bill 1250 requires local governments to adopt efficient building codes.

Senate Bill 236, a reauthorization of the state’s Public Utilities Commission, includes a wide variety of measures aimed at transitioning to clean energy. It creates a financial tool for electric utilities to defray the costs associated with retiring coal plants, and for the first time instructs state regulators to consider the “social cost of carbon” in their decisions.

What happens with appliances manufactured in other states/countries? Will they be disallowed to be sold? Do they expect manufacturers to comply and build models just for Colorado? Will Colorado citizens simply drive to a neighboring state and purchase the appliances there? Will the State of Colorado come after people who fail to comply?

As for the social cost of carbon, well, that’s a big red flag that people’s cost of living will soon skyrocket while the availability of reliable, dependable, affordable energy will be reduced.

Of course

That’s an ambitious goal, but some activists are worried it doesn’t go far enough. While U.N. scientists said last year that the world must cut carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030 to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change, most realistic models for achieving such a cut require rich, developed countries like the U.S. to decarbonize much faster. Activists with the Colorado Coalition for a Livable Climate, among others, have called for a more aggressive timeline.

And you can bet these activists are not practicing what they preach. They’re always just fine with messing with your money and your life, though.

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Ted Cruz, AOC Find Common Ground On Ex-Lawmakers Becoming Lobbyists

By William Teach May 31, 2019 – 8:14 am

Is this a big big issues? No. Is it a problem? Yes. Too many lawmakers turn their insider knowledge from even just a term or two into a career in lobbying for companies to get more taxpayer money

TED CRUZ AND OCASIO-CORTEZ FIND SOMETHING THEY CAN WORK ON TOGETHER. OTHER LAWMAKERS JOIN IN

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found something they agree on Thursday, and other lawmakers say they will pitch in, Ocasio-Cortez announced in a Thursday evening tweet.

“Okay, with [Democratic California Sen. Brian Schatz and Cruz] we’ve got at least one D-R team in the Senate to ban members becoming lobbyists, [and] myself w/ [Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy] makes at least one D-R team in the House. And that’s just in a few hours – there will surely be more from both parties to sign on. Nice,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote with a thumbs-up emoji.

Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez bantered about their shared discontent with the so-called “revolving door of K Street” — federal lawmakers using their connections to become well-heeled lobbyists once they are out of office. Law mandates ex-House members must wait a year to lobby their former colleagues, while ex-senators must wait two.

A report finding around half of ex-members of the 115th Congress went straight to lobbying and other gigs with federal influence came out Thursday and prompted the exchange.

“Here’s something I don’t say often: on this point, I AGREE with [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. Indeed, I have long called for a LIFETIME BAN on former Members of Congress becoming lobbyists. The Swamp would hate it, but perhaps a chance for some bipartisan cooperation?” Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Unfortunately, you can bet that there will be enough members who will be against this because they want to get that sweet, sweet money once they leave Congress, so they’ll refuse to vote for any legislation.

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