Posts for: Rivers
May 9, 2017 15:42:31 #
(Main)
desparado wrote:
what part of lowering air and water standards don't you understand i'm sorry red states don't have this problem probably because can't afford cars yet
Another absolute stupid comment....your norm.
May 9, 2017 15:24:30 #
(Main)
desparado wrote:
If this happens it will be a sad day I get it keeping water and air clean hurts the bottom line . All for greed
Trump, or the GOP, is not going to dirty the air, or water....moron. I saw an article yesterday depicting the top ten cities with the dirtiest air, and guess what? Six of those cities were in CA, and held the top five spots, and the seventh spot. And, everyone was run by a Democrat, those six CA cities are also in a blue state. So, I suggest you Democrats are the ones that dirty the air and water. So, clean up your own back yard.
May 8, 2017 16:26:35 #
pafret wrote:
Those aren't challenges, they are miracles!
Impossibilities!!!!!!
May 8, 2017 16:22:06 #
(Main)
America Only wrote:
Not that I should care but...you can down load a f... (show quote)
Malwarebytes is an excellent anti virus and malware tool, I have it on my computer. Instead of turning off your computer when you get that "warning you have to contact microsoft windows to pay for a fix as the computer is "locked up" is to do a "Ctrl-Alt-Del" and select "Task Manager". Then select the browser listed, and check 'End Task' at the bottom. It will shut off the browser. It will save wear and tear on your power supply. Then I suggest getting the app "CCleaner" and run that. They have a free scaled down version, but I have the Pro version which has more options - either one is good.
May 8, 2017 16:02:21 #
(Main)
Finally the Trump administration is starting to get serious about taking on the Green Blob.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt – perhaps stung by criticisms that he was turning into a squish – today reaffirmed, in an interview with CNBC, that he is not a believer in catastrophic man-made global warming.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet…”
This new boldness coincides with a purge of warmist scientific advisers at both the EPA and the Interior Department.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has chosen to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards, committees, and other entities both within and outside of his department. EPA and Interior officials began informing outside advisers of the move on Friday, and notifications continued over the weekend.
Pruitt’s move could significantly change the makeup of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, which advises EPA’s key scientific arm on whether the research it does has sufficient rigor and integrity. All of the members being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated.
Among the tragic victims is Robert Richardson, a Michigan professor and “ecological economist”, who tweeted movingly about his martyrdom.
Follow
Robert Richardson @ecotrope
Today, I was Trumped. I have had the pleasure of serving on the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors, and my appointment was terminated today.
5:57 PM - 5 May 2017
5,701 5,701 Retweets 5,708 5,708 likes
A closer look at the man’s biog gives a few clues as to why his contract was not renewed:
His research, teaching, and outreach program focuses primarily on sustainable development, and he uses a variety of methods from the behavioral and social sciences to study decision-making about the use of natural resources and the values of ecosystem services.
Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
But the biggest sign of Trump’s commitment to slaying the Green Blob is expected tomorrow when we’ll finally hear whether or not the president means to keep his election promise to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement.
If this happens it will be a disaster for the U.S., with the only beneficiary being White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. At least that’s what environmental journalist David Roberts claims in Vox.
Given that Roberts is the guy who once called for Nuremberg-style trials for climate skeptics perhaps his views should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nonetheless, he is quite right when he argues that whether the U.S. stays in or out of Paris it will make little difference on the policy front.
[The agreement] asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.
Roberts suspects, as I do, that the legalistic reasons being advanced for pulling out of Paris have probably been overdone.
But whatever works is fine by me. The important thing is for the U.S. to pull out of Paris not in order to facilitate exit from Obama’s Clean Power Plan or to avert legal action from politicized litigators like the Sierra Club but purely as an upward extension of the presidential middle finger to the bloated, corrupt and overmighty Climate Industrial Complex.
If and when Trump pulls the U.S. out of Paris it won’t be the end for the Green Blob, nor even the beginning of the end. But it might, perhaps, be the end of the beginning. It will be arguably the first big signal by any major leader of the Western world that the tide on the Great Global Warming Scam is about to turn and that the Alarmists are about to be crushed by fortune’s wheel.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/08/delingpole-and-so-it-begins-trumps-great-climate-purge/
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt – perhaps stung by criticisms that he was turning into a squish – today reaffirmed, in an interview with CNBC, that he is not a believer in catastrophic man-made global warming.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet…”
This new boldness coincides with a purge of warmist scientific advisers at both the EPA and the Interior Department.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has chosen to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards, committees, and other entities both within and outside of his department. EPA and Interior officials began informing outside advisers of the move on Friday, and notifications continued over the weekend.
Pruitt’s move could significantly change the makeup of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, which advises EPA’s key scientific arm on whether the research it does has sufficient rigor and integrity. All of the members being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated.
Among the tragic victims is Robert Richardson, a Michigan professor and “ecological economist”, who tweeted movingly about his martyrdom.
Follow
Robert Richardson @ecotrope
Today, I was Trumped. I have had the pleasure of serving on the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors, and my appointment was terminated today.
5:57 PM - 5 May 2017
5,701 5,701 Retweets 5,708 5,708 likes
A closer look at the man’s biog gives a few clues as to why his contract was not renewed:
His research, teaching, and outreach program focuses primarily on sustainable development, and he uses a variety of methods from the behavioral and social sciences to study decision-making about the use of natural resources and the values of ecosystem services.
Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
But the biggest sign of Trump’s commitment to slaying the Green Blob is expected tomorrow when we’ll finally hear whether or not the president means to keep his election promise to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement.
If this happens it will be a disaster for the U.S., with the only beneficiary being White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. At least that’s what environmental journalist David Roberts claims in Vox.
Given that Roberts is the guy who once called for Nuremberg-style trials for climate skeptics perhaps his views should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nonetheless, he is quite right when he argues that whether the U.S. stays in or out of Paris it will make little difference on the policy front.
[The agreement] asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.
Roberts suspects, as I do, that the legalistic reasons being advanced for pulling out of Paris have probably been overdone.
But whatever works is fine by me. The important thing is for the U.S. to pull out of Paris not in order to facilitate exit from Obama’s Clean Power Plan or to avert legal action from politicized litigators like the Sierra Club but purely as an upward extension of the presidential middle finger to the bloated, corrupt and overmighty Climate Industrial Complex.
If and when Trump pulls the U.S. out of Paris it won’t be the end for the Green Blob, nor even the beginning of the end. But it might, perhaps, be the end of the beginning. It will be arguably the first big signal by any major leader of the Western world that the tide on the Great Global Warming Scam is about to turn and that the Alarmists are about to be crushed by fortune’s wheel.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/08/delingpole-and-so-it-begins-trumps-great-climate-purge/
May 8, 2017 15:57:35 #
(Main)
permafrost wrote:
This morning, Monday 5/8/17
My computer protection shut down the connection to OPP due to virus infection..
Anyone else have that happen?
Is it now cleared??
My computer protection shut down the connection to OPP due to virus infection..
Anyone else have that happen?
Is it now cleared??
Maybe the virus was you? What I mean is you may already have a virus on your computer. I have had no virus issues.
May 8, 2017 11:26:50 #
(Main)
After 6 Deadly Islamic Attacks and 130 Deaths in 3 Years – Paris Votes 90% for the Muslim loving leftist Macron
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/6-deadly-islamic-attacks-238-deaths-3-years-paris-votes-90-macron-update2/?utm_source=conservativereview-footnotes&utm_medium=footnotes-email&utm_campaign=footnotes&utm_content=cr-footnotes-May0817&j=854121&e=willisacres@infowest.com&l=10553_HTML&u=25722091&mid=7201597&jb=0
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/6-deadly-islamic-attacks-238-deaths-3-years-paris-votes-90-macron-update2/?utm_source=conservativereview-footnotes&utm_medium=footnotes-email&utm_campaign=footnotes&utm_content=cr-footnotes-May0817&j=854121&e=willisacres@infowest.com&l=10553_HTML&u=25722091&mid=7201597&jb=0
May 8, 2017 11:18:08 #
(Main)
President Trump came in for much jeering when he told reporters he had “inherited a mess” from President Barack Obama. On the economy, though, Obama did indeed leave behind a hidden mess: a seemingly healthy jobs market dependent on cheap debt.
When this debt bubble bursts, just as the last one did, the manufacturing jobs Trump wants to save will be in even greater peril.
The country’s last bubble was in housing. Between 2000 and 2007, Americans nearly doubled their mortgage debt, from $5.9 trillion to $10.6 trillion.
This didn’t bother anyone in a position of power. The housing boom created millions of jobs, from construction to home-furnishing, and people felt rich.
What bothered the pols was when the illusion broke.
Since the 2008 crash, neither Democrats nor Republicans have been interested in creating a sturdier economy. Instead, they’ve built up another bubble, this time in the car and SUV industry.
How? The same way: cheap debt. In 2010, Americans owed $809 billion on their cars (after adjusting for inflation). Today, they owe nearly $1.2 trillion, according to the New York Fed.
And the rate of growth has been accelerating: Last year alone, Americans borrowed $93 billion to buy cars (after accounting for people who repaid such debt); 2016 was “the highest auto loan . . . year in the 18-year history of the data,” Fed researchers said, not entirely enthusiastically.
People with great credit have been buying new SUVs because interest rates have been at record lows. As interest rates rise, they’ll pull back, but perhaps not that much. By definition, they can afford to pay a little more.
But who is borrowing for used cars — and at much higher interest rates — is a huge concern.
People with not-great credit scores have always made up about a fifth of the auto-loan market.
But the percentage of people borrowing even though they have really bad credit scores has surged, reports Bloomberg. It’s now a third of the subprime auto-bond market, up from just 5 percent seven years ago.
A Standard & Poor’s analysis of just one big subprime auto bond tells the story. Last week, a company called DriveTime, which sells used cars in 26 states to people with bad credit, was in the market to issue $442 million worth of bonds backed by auto loans.
The average credit score of borrowers was 538 — indicating a history of serious default. And, as S&P notes, “today’s subprime customer appears to be . . . weaker . . . than that of several years ago,” because people who defaulted right after the housing crash at least had the excuse that they were caught up in a global bubble.
These loans are for people who have no choice but to borrow to buy a car, and no bargaining power on the interest rate they pay: close to 20 percent.
Even though the borrowers pay through the nose, they depend on cheap global credit. With interest rates still near record lows, lenders have to take ever more risk in a low-interest-rate environment to make a little money. As for that risk: Delinquency rates are rising, with 4.32 percent of subprime borrowers in general at least 60 days late last year, up from 3.52 two years earlier, says S&P.
The bigger risk here isn’t the risk to investors, though. The auto-loan market is still much smaller than the housing market, and the investment world hasn’t created trillions of dollars of derivative securities based on this market (at least not that we know of). And unlike with houses, no one ever expects the value of a car to increase with use.
No, this bubble presents a much more direct risk to the economy — and manufacturing jobs. If people with terrible credit can’t borrow an average of nearly $18,000 to buy a used car (what the DriveTime customer pays), the market for used cars collapses.
That, in turn, affects the market for new cars. Indeed, the US auto industry has seen sales decline this year, after clocking half a decade of record highs.
That’s bad news for the 946,300 Americans who work in the nation’s auto-manufacturing industry. Car-makers have been adding jobs since 2009, when the industry hit a low of 653,300 workers. But over the past year, they’ve added only 2,400 workers, down from the 40,300 people they added the previous year.
If the auto-credit market sputters out during Trump’s first term — and it’s hard to see how it won’t — Trump would be justified in blaming his predecessor.
But he’ll face the same bad options previous presidents have. No one has quite figured out how to fix this economy without a lot of short-term pain.
By Nicole Gelinas
When this debt bubble bursts, just as the last one did, the manufacturing jobs Trump wants to save will be in even greater peril.
The country’s last bubble was in housing. Between 2000 and 2007, Americans nearly doubled their mortgage debt, from $5.9 trillion to $10.6 trillion.
This didn’t bother anyone in a position of power. The housing boom created millions of jobs, from construction to home-furnishing, and people felt rich.
What bothered the pols was when the illusion broke.
Since the 2008 crash, neither Democrats nor Republicans have been interested in creating a sturdier economy. Instead, they’ve built up another bubble, this time in the car and SUV industry.
How? The same way: cheap debt. In 2010, Americans owed $809 billion on their cars (after adjusting for inflation). Today, they owe nearly $1.2 trillion, according to the New York Fed.
And the rate of growth has been accelerating: Last year alone, Americans borrowed $93 billion to buy cars (after accounting for people who repaid such debt); 2016 was “the highest auto loan . . . year in the 18-year history of the data,” Fed researchers said, not entirely enthusiastically.
People with great credit have been buying new SUVs because interest rates have been at record lows. As interest rates rise, they’ll pull back, but perhaps not that much. By definition, they can afford to pay a little more.
But who is borrowing for used cars — and at much higher interest rates — is a huge concern.
People with not-great credit scores have always made up about a fifth of the auto-loan market.
But the percentage of people borrowing even though they have really bad credit scores has surged, reports Bloomberg. It’s now a third of the subprime auto-bond market, up from just 5 percent seven years ago.
A Standard & Poor’s analysis of just one big subprime auto bond tells the story. Last week, a company called DriveTime, which sells used cars in 26 states to people with bad credit, was in the market to issue $442 million worth of bonds backed by auto loans.
The average credit score of borrowers was 538 — indicating a history of serious default. And, as S&P notes, “today’s subprime customer appears to be . . . weaker . . . than that of several years ago,” because people who defaulted right after the housing crash at least had the excuse that they were caught up in a global bubble.
These loans are for people who have no choice but to borrow to buy a car, and no bargaining power on the interest rate they pay: close to 20 percent.
Even though the borrowers pay through the nose, they depend on cheap global credit. With interest rates still near record lows, lenders have to take ever more risk in a low-interest-rate environment to make a little money. As for that risk: Delinquency rates are rising, with 4.32 percent of subprime borrowers in general at least 60 days late last year, up from 3.52 two years earlier, says S&P.
The bigger risk here isn’t the risk to investors, though. The auto-loan market is still much smaller than the housing market, and the investment world hasn’t created trillions of dollars of derivative securities based on this market (at least not that we know of). And unlike with houses, no one ever expects the value of a car to increase with use.
No, this bubble presents a much more direct risk to the economy — and manufacturing jobs. If people with terrible credit can’t borrow an average of nearly $18,000 to buy a used car (what the DriveTime customer pays), the market for used cars collapses.
That, in turn, affects the market for new cars. Indeed, the US auto industry has seen sales decline this year, after clocking half a decade of record highs.
That’s bad news for the 946,300 Americans who work in the nation’s auto-manufacturing industry. Car-makers have been adding jobs since 2009, when the industry hit a low of 653,300 workers. But over the past year, they’ve added only 2,400 workers, down from the 40,300 people they added the previous year.
If the auto-credit market sputters out during Trump’s first term — and it’s hard to see how it won’t — Trump would be justified in blaming his predecessor.
But he’ll face the same bad options previous presidents have. No one has quite figured out how to fix this economy without a lot of short-term pain.
By Nicole Gelinas
May 8, 2017 11:14:43 #
(Main)
Melee at Colonie Denny's gets 3.4M+ Facebook views
Police confirm the early morning fight, but said there were no arrests
https://www.facebook.com/Nicknpattiwhack/videos/1855907804658369/
Police confirm the early morning fight, but said there were no arrests
https://www.facebook.com/Nicknpattiwhack/videos/1855907804658369/
May 8, 2017 10:01:21 #
(Main)
Republicans won the presidency and majorities in Congress based in part on promises to replace Obamacare. Nonetheless, with so many Republicans facing re-election in states that voted for Clinton, the strategy of “repeal and replace” is easier said than done. Furthermore, in view of the challenges involved in garnering enough votes for the “Obama-Lite” alternative that barely passed the House, Republicans appear to be running out of options.
If the “gradualist” strategy is so problematic, why not move to single payer? In Japan, healthcare spending makes up only 10% of GDP even though it has the world’s highest percentage of people 65 or older. In the U.S. it is an appalling 17% (Fig. 1). Japan also has the world’s lowest infant mortality, while in America this healthcare indicator exceeds that of all other developed nations with a comparable GDP (Fig. 2). If lack of access to healthcare is responsible for this shocking statistic, why not “get with the program” and shift these costs to taxpayers as they do in nearly all other affluent nations?
Before turning over 17% of GDP to the government, we should not overlook one extraordinary exception to this worldwide trend: Singapore is second only to Japan in having the world’s lowest infant mortality (Fig. 2) even though it has the least-subsidized healthcare in the developed world (Fig. 1). Singapore also stands apart from other developed nations in that it spends less than 5% of its GDP on healthcare (Fig. 1). If privatization works so well in Singapore, why have market forces failed so miserably in America?
While it is common knowledge that increasing the supply or decreasing the demand results in lower costs, many overlook the importance of having a critical mass of savvy customers shopping around for the best deals. This selective pressure ensures that the product or service gets better and cheaper for all consumers. In Singapore, patients shop around because co-payments cover a considerable portion of their medical bills and everyone is required to have a health savings account. In the single-payer systems that predominate in Europe, it is the government that does the shopping and bargaining. In America, health maintenance organizations stabilized prices in the 1990s by bargaining with providers and rationing services. However, many patients objected to “managed care” and the ensuing backlash resulted in government mandates that limited what these HMOs could do to cut costs. In the absence of a conscientious buyer, hyperinflation resumed by the end of the decade. Even though European governments provide healthcare at a lower cost, Americans who want to replace Obamacare with single payer should be careful what they wish for. More on this later.
Another reliable strategy for lowering costs is deregulation. We need not look abroad to see this principle applies to medical services: The cost of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. has remained remarkably stable despite a huge increase in demand. This has been attributed largely to a streamlined regulatory process that makes it easier for competitors to enter the market and for cost-cutting innovations to get approved.
Competition between providers intensifies when there is a lower demand. The Canadian government lowers demand for healthcare by rationing, which in turn results in lower prices. Singapore presumably reduces demand by investing in health education. Even though this city-state has one of the lowest obesity rates in the developed world, how much this can be attributed to health education is debatable. At any rate, there is growing evidence that obesity increases the risk of infant mortality in affluent countries (Fig. 3). Strategies for curbing obesity in the U.S. are beyond the scope of the article, but its presumptive role in neonatal mortality underscores the seriousness of this problem in America. It also discredits the narrative that “lack of access” to healthcare is largely responsible for infant mortality in America.
As more insurers withdraw from the exchanges it becomes increasingly evident that Obamacare was meant to fail in order to pave the way for single payer. Many welcome this transition because they fear a return to the “bad old days” when people with costly pre-existing conditions were justifiably reluctant to change jobs. But since so many Americans rebelled when their healthcare choices were delegated to HMOs in the 1990s, they might have second thoughts after the government becomes the only HMO in town. Hence, the Singapore model of putting patients more in control may be the most viable option. After all, an important restraint on the cost of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. is that clients usually pay out of pocket.
In all fairness, Singapore differs from the U.S. in many other ways; including walkability, home ownership rates, and transportation policies for minimizing gridlock. Even though none of these variables relate directly to healthcare, all of them affect risk factors like obesity and stress. Anyone who believes that this island nation’s policies will automatically achieve the same level of success in the U.S. is being disingenuous. Nonetheless, the Singapore model shows that there are alternatives to single payer for making healthcare both cost-effective and accessible. Furthermore, since policymakers in single-payer nations like Australia are also looking to Singapore for ways to contain healthcare costs, this model may provide valuable lessons for all nations regardless as to how healthcare is financed.
See charts, and article: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/05/healthcare_reform_lets_take_a_close_look_at_some_examples_abroad.html
If the “gradualist” strategy is so problematic, why not move to single payer? In Japan, healthcare spending makes up only 10% of GDP even though it has the world’s highest percentage of people 65 or older. In the U.S. it is an appalling 17% (Fig. 1). Japan also has the world’s lowest infant mortality, while in America this healthcare indicator exceeds that of all other developed nations with a comparable GDP (Fig. 2). If lack of access to healthcare is responsible for this shocking statistic, why not “get with the program” and shift these costs to taxpayers as they do in nearly all other affluent nations?
Before turning over 17% of GDP to the government, we should not overlook one extraordinary exception to this worldwide trend: Singapore is second only to Japan in having the world’s lowest infant mortality (Fig. 2) even though it has the least-subsidized healthcare in the developed world (Fig. 1). Singapore also stands apart from other developed nations in that it spends less than 5% of its GDP on healthcare (Fig. 1). If privatization works so well in Singapore, why have market forces failed so miserably in America?
While it is common knowledge that increasing the supply or decreasing the demand results in lower costs, many overlook the importance of having a critical mass of savvy customers shopping around for the best deals. This selective pressure ensures that the product or service gets better and cheaper for all consumers. In Singapore, patients shop around because co-payments cover a considerable portion of their medical bills and everyone is required to have a health savings account. In the single-payer systems that predominate in Europe, it is the government that does the shopping and bargaining. In America, health maintenance organizations stabilized prices in the 1990s by bargaining with providers and rationing services. However, many patients objected to “managed care” and the ensuing backlash resulted in government mandates that limited what these HMOs could do to cut costs. In the absence of a conscientious buyer, hyperinflation resumed by the end of the decade. Even though European governments provide healthcare at a lower cost, Americans who want to replace Obamacare with single payer should be careful what they wish for. More on this later.
Another reliable strategy for lowering costs is deregulation. We need not look abroad to see this principle applies to medical services: The cost of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. has remained remarkably stable despite a huge increase in demand. This has been attributed largely to a streamlined regulatory process that makes it easier for competitors to enter the market and for cost-cutting innovations to get approved.
Competition between providers intensifies when there is a lower demand. The Canadian government lowers demand for healthcare by rationing, which in turn results in lower prices. Singapore presumably reduces demand by investing in health education. Even though this city-state has one of the lowest obesity rates in the developed world, how much this can be attributed to health education is debatable. At any rate, there is growing evidence that obesity increases the risk of infant mortality in affluent countries (Fig. 3). Strategies for curbing obesity in the U.S. are beyond the scope of the article, but its presumptive role in neonatal mortality underscores the seriousness of this problem in America. It also discredits the narrative that “lack of access” to healthcare is largely responsible for infant mortality in America.
As more insurers withdraw from the exchanges it becomes increasingly evident that Obamacare was meant to fail in order to pave the way for single payer. Many welcome this transition because they fear a return to the “bad old days” when people with costly pre-existing conditions were justifiably reluctant to change jobs. But since so many Americans rebelled when their healthcare choices were delegated to HMOs in the 1990s, they might have second thoughts after the government becomes the only HMO in town. Hence, the Singapore model of putting patients more in control may be the most viable option. After all, an important restraint on the cost of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. is that clients usually pay out of pocket.
In all fairness, Singapore differs from the U.S. in many other ways; including walkability, home ownership rates, and transportation policies for minimizing gridlock. Even though none of these variables relate directly to healthcare, all of them affect risk factors like obesity and stress. Anyone who believes that this island nation’s policies will automatically achieve the same level of success in the U.S. is being disingenuous. Nonetheless, the Singapore model shows that there are alternatives to single payer for making healthcare both cost-effective and accessible. Furthermore, since policymakers in single-payer nations like Australia are also looking to Singapore for ways to contain healthcare costs, this model may provide valuable lessons for all nations regardless as to how healthcare is financed.
See charts, and article: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/05/healthcare_reform_lets_take_a_close_look_at_some_examples_abroad.html
May 8, 2017 09:47:11 #
(Main)
Those of us who want to reduce President Obama’s future influence in American politics are looking forward to the release of David J. Garrow’s new 1,400-page opus, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Although Professor Garrow is a Bernie Sanders donor, he has a reputation as an honest, straightforward historian. This reputation is the result of his balanced and even somewhat damaging Pulitzer Prize winning book on Martin Luther King, Bearing the Cross (1986).
While some journalists have already received preliminary copies of Rising Star, most of us will have to wait a little longer since the book will be released on May 9, 2017. As for me, however, I have been waiting to read Garrow’s book since December 2011.
I was one of the 1,000 people that Garrow interviewed, a number he repeatedly refers to when he wants to present his book as the new, gold standard for Obama biographies. Garrow’s book is competing for this honor against David Remnick’s The Bridge (2010) and David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story (2012). Neither Remnick or Maraniss interviewed me even though they interviewed almost all of the students I knew at Occidental College between 1979-1981.
I have always found this odd since my face-to-face observations of young Obama’s radical ideology were reported -- prior to the publication of either book -- by Ronald Kessler in a NEWSMAX article that appeared in early February 2010 - http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/obama-college-marxism-occidental/2010/02/08/id/349329/.
Later, my complete report of Obama’s commitment to a leadership role in a coming, inevitable Communist revolution appeared in an article I wrote called “Meeting Young Obama” that was published in American Thinker in February 2011 - http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html.
Maraniss’s failure to interview me seems particularly misguided since my first impression of young Obama has been accessed and cited by so many other authors. So far, it has appeared in Glenn Beck’s “Liars” (2016), Jack Cashill’s “Deconstructing Obama” (2011), Stanley Kurtz’s “Radical-In-Chief” (2010), Paul Kengor’s “Dupes” (2010) and “The Communist” (2012), and Michael Savages’ “Trickle Up Poverty” (2010).
Accordingly, I was suspicious when I first heard from Garrow by e-mail because my story had been so neglected by previous mainstream historians. In an abundance of caution, I checked out his YouTube videos and then asked him to give me a call so I could be sure I was talking to the real Pulitzer Prize historian and not some deranged Occupy Wall Street protester. Over the phone, we agreed to meet at my home in Laguna Niguel.
As a political scientist, I have spoken with presidential historians before, including the late James MacGregor Burns who was a colleague at Williams College. However, I had never been interviewed by one.
I was surprisingly nervous. As Garrow sat in my living room, I almost dumped a full glass of ice tea on him. It was also surprisingly unpleasant to remember my youthful days as a recent Occidental College graduate who was dating a girl, Caroline Boss, who was still a senior at Occidental and who was so close to young Obama that Maraniss claims she was one of the most significant composite characters included in Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995). I prepared for the interview by sorting through old photographs and rereading about 30 cards and letters from that era of my life.
As it turned out, Garrow was something of a gossip. He entertained me with news regarding the fate of my old friends and acquaintances: who got married to who, who succeeded in life and who failed. I also found out Garrow plays an awkward role in informing people of the deaths of those who used to be in their social circles. In my case, Garrow revealed one of the Occidental College radical leaders I knew best, Gary Chapman, 58, had died of a heart attack the previous December.
During the recorded interview, my aim was to stress my credibility and to get as much of my story as I could into the historical record. I shared with him evidence of my relationship with Boss including some photos and a romantic card she sent me.
Over time, it became clear that while Garrow was familiar with my American Thinker piece on young Obama, he was much more interested in tracking down the community which surrounded Obama at Occidental and by all accounts continued to support and stay in touch with him right up to his election as president.
Sensing his true interests, I surprised him by bringing out an old, tattered, green address book which included Boss’s phone numbers and addresses in both the U.S. and Europe. He seemed positively giddy about it. He wrote down nothing and instead he read out loud from my address book into his recorder.
I did speak to him off-the-record too, but only about sexual matters, the sort of unseemly things which would be embarrassing to air but still would help him understand the intimate social connections of Obama’s Occidental College friends. He indicated to me that his next stop would be Washington state where he would interview Caroline and her husband, Tom, who had also been a student at Occidental College.
After we were done, I remember Garrow was gracious enough to pose with me for a photo.
It turns out his wife, Darleen, had been waiting for us in a car while the interview took place. As she took the picture, I praised her husband for his status as a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. She seemed a little jaded by my compliment and less effusive than me in praising his worthwhile accomplishments.
At this point, I am not at all confident I had much impact on Garrow’s book.
I listened to a radio interview he gave to Jamie Weinstein and he flatly dismissed any suggestion that young Obama was gay, Marxist, Muslim or a beneficiary of the writing and editing skills of Bill Ayers, an unrepentant domestic terrorist. Using the broadest possible definitions, in contrast, I see the young Obama as all four. I am waiting to see if the mainstream media will use Garrow’s book to short-circuit future attempts to create an honest account of Obama's life, an account which should rightfully end his political influence.
By John C. Drew, Ph.D.
While some journalists have already received preliminary copies of Rising Star, most of us will have to wait a little longer since the book will be released on May 9, 2017. As for me, however, I have been waiting to read Garrow’s book since December 2011.
I was one of the 1,000 people that Garrow interviewed, a number he repeatedly refers to when he wants to present his book as the new, gold standard for Obama biographies. Garrow’s book is competing for this honor against David Remnick’s The Bridge (2010) and David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story (2012). Neither Remnick or Maraniss interviewed me even though they interviewed almost all of the students I knew at Occidental College between 1979-1981.
I have always found this odd since my face-to-face observations of young Obama’s radical ideology were reported -- prior to the publication of either book -- by Ronald Kessler in a NEWSMAX article that appeared in early February 2010 - http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/obama-college-marxism-occidental/2010/02/08/id/349329/.
Later, my complete report of Obama’s commitment to a leadership role in a coming, inevitable Communist revolution appeared in an article I wrote called “Meeting Young Obama” that was published in American Thinker in February 2011 - http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html.
Maraniss’s failure to interview me seems particularly misguided since my first impression of young Obama has been accessed and cited by so many other authors. So far, it has appeared in Glenn Beck’s “Liars” (2016), Jack Cashill’s “Deconstructing Obama” (2011), Stanley Kurtz’s “Radical-In-Chief” (2010), Paul Kengor’s “Dupes” (2010) and “The Communist” (2012), and Michael Savages’ “Trickle Up Poverty” (2010).
Accordingly, I was suspicious when I first heard from Garrow by e-mail because my story had been so neglected by previous mainstream historians. In an abundance of caution, I checked out his YouTube videos and then asked him to give me a call so I could be sure I was talking to the real Pulitzer Prize historian and not some deranged Occupy Wall Street protester. Over the phone, we agreed to meet at my home in Laguna Niguel.
As a political scientist, I have spoken with presidential historians before, including the late James MacGregor Burns who was a colleague at Williams College. However, I had never been interviewed by one.
I was surprisingly nervous. As Garrow sat in my living room, I almost dumped a full glass of ice tea on him. It was also surprisingly unpleasant to remember my youthful days as a recent Occidental College graduate who was dating a girl, Caroline Boss, who was still a senior at Occidental and who was so close to young Obama that Maraniss claims she was one of the most significant composite characters included in Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995). I prepared for the interview by sorting through old photographs and rereading about 30 cards and letters from that era of my life.
As it turned out, Garrow was something of a gossip. He entertained me with news regarding the fate of my old friends and acquaintances: who got married to who, who succeeded in life and who failed. I also found out Garrow plays an awkward role in informing people of the deaths of those who used to be in their social circles. In my case, Garrow revealed one of the Occidental College radical leaders I knew best, Gary Chapman, 58, had died of a heart attack the previous December.
During the recorded interview, my aim was to stress my credibility and to get as much of my story as I could into the historical record. I shared with him evidence of my relationship with Boss including some photos and a romantic card she sent me.
Over time, it became clear that while Garrow was familiar with my American Thinker piece on young Obama, he was much more interested in tracking down the community which surrounded Obama at Occidental and by all accounts continued to support and stay in touch with him right up to his election as president.
Sensing his true interests, I surprised him by bringing out an old, tattered, green address book which included Boss’s phone numbers and addresses in both the U.S. and Europe. He seemed positively giddy about it. He wrote down nothing and instead he read out loud from my address book into his recorder.
I did speak to him off-the-record too, but only about sexual matters, the sort of unseemly things which would be embarrassing to air but still would help him understand the intimate social connections of Obama’s Occidental College friends. He indicated to me that his next stop would be Washington state where he would interview Caroline and her husband, Tom, who had also been a student at Occidental College.
After we were done, I remember Garrow was gracious enough to pose with me for a photo.
It turns out his wife, Darleen, had been waiting for us in a car while the interview took place. As she took the picture, I praised her husband for his status as a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. She seemed a little jaded by my compliment and less effusive than me in praising his worthwhile accomplishments.
At this point, I am not at all confident I had much impact on Garrow’s book.
I listened to a radio interview he gave to Jamie Weinstein and he flatly dismissed any suggestion that young Obama was gay, Marxist, Muslim or a beneficiary of the writing and editing skills of Bill Ayers, an unrepentant domestic terrorist. Using the broadest possible definitions, in contrast, I see the young Obama as all four. I am waiting to see if the mainstream media will use Garrow’s book to short-circuit future attempts to create an honest account of Obama's life, an account which should rightfully end his political influence.
By John C. Drew, Ph.D.
May 8, 2017 09:39:16 #
(Main)
lpnmajor wrote:
Oh? How can he do that - since his Supreme Court pick adamantly stated that Judges are not partisan or ideological? It's on record dummy. 
Piss off....left-leaning fence straddler.
May 8, 2017 09:36:54 #
(Main)
Even though he attended no classes. Once again, the left is trying to make a martyr out of a drug ingesting thug.
Florida Memorial University is planning to award Trayvon Martin a posthumous bachelor of science degree in aviation during its commencement ceremonies this Saturday.
Didn’t think of Trayvon as the scholarly type, did you?
Since his death in 2012, Martin, the 17-year-old thug who was fatally shot during a fight with George Zimmerman, has been made into a martyr.
According to Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s mother, Trayvon wanted to be a pilot or an airplane mechanic. But he was far from a model student. According to reports, Trayvon had been suspended twice that school year before his death for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time for being found with marijuana.
In 2010, Chief Charles Hurley of the Miami-Dade School Police Department implemented a policy that lowered the number of criminal reports, altering statistics to create the impression that crime was dropping within the school system. Crimes were being reported as disciplinary infractions. If Chief Hurley and the Miami-Dade School District had done their jobs, Trayvon may have gotten the wake-up call needed to change his life.
As I write in “The Antidote,” Trayvon’s parents failed him. Stable, married parents are the foundation for life, but Trayvon’s mother and father abandoned him. The only real mother he knew was his stepmother, Alicia Stanley, with whom he lived for eight years. That was taken from him when his father, Tracey Martin, started seeing another woman, Brandi Green, and gave up full guardianship to the biological mother, Sybrina Fulton.
Trayvon was stripped of the only family and mother he knew. As a result, he grew angry, used drugs and turned into a thug. It was his own anger – not “racism” – that caused his death.
Trayvon was in Sanford, Florida, visiting his father’s girlfriend at her home in the townhouse community where Zimmerman was in charge of the neighborhood watch.
Trayvon was from Miami Gardens – a crime-ridden city located in north-central Miami-Dade County. The city violent crime rate for Miami Gardens in 2012 was higher than the national violent crime rate average by 116.45 percent.
Trayvon’s biological parents, along with phony black leaders and the mainstream media, have been complicit in falsifying the narrative about Trayvon.
Patrisse Cullors, whom I interviewed on my radio show (she ran from me), is a radical black lesbian and an organizer in Black Lives Matter. She and others created the BlackLivesMatter hashtag soon after Martin’s death. Since then, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama and other human leeches have used Trayvon as the poster child for false “racism.”
Trayvon’s failing parents – especially his mother – are using his name to gain fame and money. They now have the Trayvon Martin Foundation. According to the website, it’s a “social justice organization committed to ending senseless gun violence, strengthening families through holistic support …” Whatever that means.
Fulton has been traveling and giving speeches, and she has been acting as though she was a model parent. She campaigned with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she was recognized at the Democratic National Convention along with other “Mothers of the Movement” (aka Dirty Mothers of the Movement).
So how much has the Trayvon Martin Foundation raised, and where does the money go? No one seems to know.
What we do know is that Trayvon’s parents settled a wrongful-death claim against the homeowners’ association in the gated community where he was killed. The final settlement is believed to be more than $1 million.
Within three days of Trayvon Martin’s death, his family hired a media-consulting firm. Within two weeks of Trayvon’s death, his mother filed legal documents to trademark his name. Soon after, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton set out on a cross-country tour and even went to Europe to collect money. While Sybrina Fulton already had a $68,768 salary with the Miami-Dade County government, she also received an eight-month paid vacation worth $40,825.
Rapper Jay Z and the Weinstein Company are partnering on a series of film and television projects about Trayvon. The projects are reportedly based on two books – “Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It” by attorney Lisa Bloom (daughter of Gloria Allred) and “Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin” by Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin. How’s that for objectivity?!
If Trayvon’s parents were honest, they would admit they failed him, but they’re not, so they’re pushing a lie and exploiting their dead son.
We know Trayvon is being given a silly posthumous degree to continue falsifying his life story. Just like the “gentle giant” Mike Brown and others. Their stories are altered to make them appear as victims who were unjustly cut down. Making them look better than they were also absolves the rotten parents of their failing.
What message is being sent out to society, and to young black men? Like suicide bombers, young black men are made to think there’s heroism in their lives when many have been nothing but a menace to society.
Rampant immorality caused primarily by the breakdown of the black family is ultimately to blame for black anger and violence. Canonizing thugs and excusing bad black parents only perpetuates the problem.
By Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson
Florida Memorial University is planning to award Trayvon Martin a posthumous bachelor of science degree in aviation during its commencement ceremonies this Saturday.
Didn’t think of Trayvon as the scholarly type, did you?
Since his death in 2012, Martin, the 17-year-old thug who was fatally shot during a fight with George Zimmerman, has been made into a martyr.
According to Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s mother, Trayvon wanted to be a pilot or an airplane mechanic. But he was far from a model student. According to reports, Trayvon had been suspended twice that school year before his death for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time for being found with marijuana.
In 2010, Chief Charles Hurley of the Miami-Dade School Police Department implemented a policy that lowered the number of criminal reports, altering statistics to create the impression that crime was dropping within the school system. Crimes were being reported as disciplinary infractions. If Chief Hurley and the Miami-Dade School District had done their jobs, Trayvon may have gotten the wake-up call needed to change his life.
As I write in “The Antidote,” Trayvon’s parents failed him. Stable, married parents are the foundation for life, but Trayvon’s mother and father abandoned him. The only real mother he knew was his stepmother, Alicia Stanley, with whom he lived for eight years. That was taken from him when his father, Tracey Martin, started seeing another woman, Brandi Green, and gave up full guardianship to the biological mother, Sybrina Fulton.
Trayvon was stripped of the only family and mother he knew. As a result, he grew angry, used drugs and turned into a thug. It was his own anger – not “racism” – that caused his death.
Trayvon was in Sanford, Florida, visiting his father’s girlfriend at her home in the townhouse community where Zimmerman was in charge of the neighborhood watch.
Trayvon was from Miami Gardens – a crime-ridden city located in north-central Miami-Dade County. The city violent crime rate for Miami Gardens in 2012 was higher than the national violent crime rate average by 116.45 percent.
Trayvon’s biological parents, along with phony black leaders and the mainstream media, have been complicit in falsifying the narrative about Trayvon.
Patrisse Cullors, whom I interviewed on my radio show (she ran from me), is a radical black lesbian and an organizer in Black Lives Matter. She and others created the BlackLivesMatter hashtag soon after Martin’s death. Since then, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama and other human leeches have used Trayvon as the poster child for false “racism.”
Trayvon’s failing parents – especially his mother – are using his name to gain fame and money. They now have the Trayvon Martin Foundation. According to the website, it’s a “social justice organization committed to ending senseless gun violence, strengthening families through holistic support …” Whatever that means.
Fulton has been traveling and giving speeches, and she has been acting as though she was a model parent. She campaigned with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she was recognized at the Democratic National Convention along with other “Mothers of the Movement” (aka Dirty Mothers of the Movement).
So how much has the Trayvon Martin Foundation raised, and where does the money go? No one seems to know.
What we do know is that Trayvon’s parents settled a wrongful-death claim against the homeowners’ association in the gated community where he was killed. The final settlement is believed to be more than $1 million.
Within three days of Trayvon Martin’s death, his family hired a media-consulting firm. Within two weeks of Trayvon’s death, his mother filed legal documents to trademark his name. Soon after, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton set out on a cross-country tour and even went to Europe to collect money. While Sybrina Fulton already had a $68,768 salary with the Miami-Dade County government, she also received an eight-month paid vacation worth $40,825.
Rapper Jay Z and the Weinstein Company are partnering on a series of film and television projects about Trayvon. The projects are reportedly based on two books – “Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It” by attorney Lisa Bloom (daughter of Gloria Allred) and “Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin” by Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin. How’s that for objectivity?!
If Trayvon’s parents were honest, they would admit they failed him, but they’re not, so they’re pushing a lie and exploiting their dead son.
We know Trayvon is being given a silly posthumous degree to continue falsifying his life story. Just like the “gentle giant” Mike Brown and others. Their stories are altered to make them appear as victims who were unjustly cut down. Making them look better than they were also absolves the rotten parents of their failing.
What message is being sent out to society, and to young black men? Like suicide bombers, young black men are made to think there’s heroism in their lives when many have been nothing but a menace to society.
Rampant immorality caused primarily by the breakdown of the black family is ultimately to blame for black anger and violence. Canonizing thugs and excusing bad black parents only perpetuates the problem.
By Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson
May 8, 2017 09:31:50 #
(Main)
While the international community and news media focus on North Korean missile tests and the country’s nuclear program, one expert warned on Sunday that North Korea may be secretly assembling the capability to take out significant parts of the U.S. homeland via an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is the chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission.
Speaking on this reporter’s talk radio program, Pry pointed to two North Korean satellites that are currently orbiting the U.S. at trajectories he says are optimized for a surprised EMP attack. “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” is broadcast on terrestrial radio on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia and online.
Pry was referring to the KMS 3-2 and KMS-4 earth observation satellites launched by North Korea in April 2012 and February 2016 respectively.
He warned: “They are positioning themselves as sort of a nuclear missile age, cyberage version of the battleship diplomacy in my view. So that they can always have one of them (satellites) very close to being over the United States or over the United States.
“Then if a crisis comes up and if we decide to attack North Korea, Kim Jong Un can threaten our president and say, ‘Well, don’t do that because we are going to burn your whole country down.’ Which is basically what he said. I mean, he has made threats about turning the United States into ashes and he connected the satellite program to this in public statements to deter us from attacking.”
“If you wanted to win a New Korean war,” added Pry, “one of the things you would certainly consider doing is taking out the United States homeland itself.”
Pry surmised the North Koreans may be taking the idea from a Soviet plan during the Cold War to attack the U.S. with an EMP as part of a larger surprise assault aimed at crippling the U.S. military.
“During the Cold War, the Russians had a secret weapon they called a fractional orbital bombardment system,” he explained. “And the idea was to do a surprise EMP attack against the United States by disguising a warhead as a satellite. Because a satellite trajectory is different from an ICBM trajectory that is aiming to go into a city. You know, for accuracy on an ICBM you launch it on a lower energy, 45-degree angle that follows a classic ballistic trajectory. Like a rifle. To land your missile on a city.”
Pry continued of the original Russian plan:
But if you put a satellite in orbit it follows a different trajectory. It doesn’t have accuracy but it puts the satellite up there so that it stays in permanent orbit so it looks different in terms of the trajectory. And guys watching their radar screens tend not to get alarmed when they see a missile being launched on that satellite trajectory. Because they assume it is for peaceful purposes. …
So, the idea was to put a nuclear weapon on a satellite. Launch it on a satellite trajectory toward the south so it is also flying away from the United States. Orbit it over the South Pole and come up on the other side of the earth so that it approaches us from the south.
Because we didn’t during the Cold War and even today we still don’t have ballistic missile early radar warnings looking south. We don’t have any national missile defenses to the south. We are blind and defenseless to the south. We can’t see anything coming from that direction. Then when this gets over the United States you light it off so that it does an EMP attack.
Pry stated that in the Soviet plan, “They were mainly interested in paralyzing our strategic forces, our strategic command and control and communications so that we couldn’t talk to our forces. Maybe take out some of the forces themselves. And that would give them time to then launch their mass attack across the North Pole to blow up our ICBMs. So, kill them once with the EMP. Kill them twice by blasting our bases by using their long-range missiles. That was the Russian plan. But the cutting edge of the plan was this surprise EMP attack.”
North Korea, by contrast, “doesn’t have enough missiles or sophisticated missiles to blow up our missile bases and bomber bases. What they seem to be doing with the satellites is the EMP part of the Soviet plan.”
“I think what they are mainly going for is the unhardened electric grid,” Pry surmised. “Transportation, communications, all of the other civilian critical infrastructure that we depend upon to keep our population alive.”
Pry spotlighted recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests minimized by the news media for reported failures. When viewed through the lens of potential preparations for an EMP attack, Pry warned, the tests were actually successes.
Pry wrote about some of those tests in a Newsmax piece last week:
I am looking at an unclassified U.S. Government chart that shows a 10-kiloton warhead (the power of the Hiroshima A-Bomb) detonated at an altitude of 70 kilometers will generate an EMP field inflicting upset and damage on unprotected electronics. …
On April 30, South Korean officials told The Korea Times and YTN TV that North Korea’s test of a medium-range missile on April 29 was not a failure, as widely reported in the world press, because it was deliberately detonated at 72 kilometers altitude. 72 kilometers is the optimum burst height for a 10-Kt warhead making an EMP attack. …
According to South Korean officials, “It’s believed the explosion was a test to develop a nuclear weapon different from existing ones.” Japan’s Tetsuro Kosaka writes in Nikkei, “Pyongyang could be saying, ‘We could launch an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack if things get really ugly.'”
“The April 29 missile launch looks suspiciously like practice for an EMP attack,” Pry wrote. “The missile was fired on a lofted trajectory, to maximize, not range, but climbing to high-altitude as quickly as possible, where it was successfully fused and detonated — testing everything but an actual nuclear warhead.”
This weekend, an editorial published in the North Korean state-run media agency KNCA threatened the White House would be “reduced to ashes.”
The same news agency warned last week that “any military provocation against the DPRK will precisely mean a total war which will lead to the final doom of the US.” DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea.
By Aaron Klein
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is the chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission.
Speaking on this reporter’s talk radio program, Pry pointed to two North Korean satellites that are currently orbiting the U.S. at trajectories he says are optimized for a surprised EMP attack. “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” is broadcast on terrestrial radio on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia and online.
Pry was referring to the KMS 3-2 and KMS-4 earth observation satellites launched by North Korea in April 2012 and February 2016 respectively.
He warned: “They are positioning themselves as sort of a nuclear missile age, cyberage version of the battleship diplomacy in my view. So that they can always have one of them (satellites) very close to being over the United States or over the United States.
“Then if a crisis comes up and if we decide to attack North Korea, Kim Jong Un can threaten our president and say, ‘Well, don’t do that because we are going to burn your whole country down.’ Which is basically what he said. I mean, he has made threats about turning the United States into ashes and he connected the satellite program to this in public statements to deter us from attacking.”
“If you wanted to win a New Korean war,” added Pry, “one of the things you would certainly consider doing is taking out the United States homeland itself.”
Pry surmised the North Koreans may be taking the idea from a Soviet plan during the Cold War to attack the U.S. with an EMP as part of a larger surprise assault aimed at crippling the U.S. military.
“During the Cold War, the Russians had a secret weapon they called a fractional orbital bombardment system,” he explained. “And the idea was to do a surprise EMP attack against the United States by disguising a warhead as a satellite. Because a satellite trajectory is different from an ICBM trajectory that is aiming to go into a city. You know, for accuracy on an ICBM you launch it on a lower energy, 45-degree angle that follows a classic ballistic trajectory. Like a rifle. To land your missile on a city.”
Pry continued of the original Russian plan:
But if you put a satellite in orbit it follows a different trajectory. It doesn’t have accuracy but it puts the satellite up there so that it stays in permanent orbit so it looks different in terms of the trajectory. And guys watching their radar screens tend not to get alarmed when they see a missile being launched on that satellite trajectory. Because they assume it is for peaceful purposes. …
So, the idea was to put a nuclear weapon on a satellite. Launch it on a satellite trajectory toward the south so it is also flying away from the United States. Orbit it over the South Pole and come up on the other side of the earth so that it approaches us from the south.
Because we didn’t during the Cold War and even today we still don’t have ballistic missile early radar warnings looking south. We don’t have any national missile defenses to the south. We are blind and defenseless to the south. We can’t see anything coming from that direction. Then when this gets over the United States you light it off so that it does an EMP attack.
Pry stated that in the Soviet plan, “They were mainly interested in paralyzing our strategic forces, our strategic command and control and communications so that we couldn’t talk to our forces. Maybe take out some of the forces themselves. And that would give them time to then launch their mass attack across the North Pole to blow up our ICBMs. So, kill them once with the EMP. Kill them twice by blasting our bases by using their long-range missiles. That was the Russian plan. But the cutting edge of the plan was this surprise EMP attack.”
North Korea, by contrast, “doesn’t have enough missiles or sophisticated missiles to blow up our missile bases and bomber bases. What they seem to be doing with the satellites is the EMP part of the Soviet plan.”
“I think what they are mainly going for is the unhardened electric grid,” Pry surmised. “Transportation, communications, all of the other civilian critical infrastructure that we depend upon to keep our population alive.”
Pry spotlighted recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests minimized by the news media for reported failures. When viewed through the lens of potential preparations for an EMP attack, Pry warned, the tests were actually successes.
Pry wrote about some of those tests in a Newsmax piece last week:
I am looking at an unclassified U.S. Government chart that shows a 10-kiloton warhead (the power of the Hiroshima A-Bomb) detonated at an altitude of 70 kilometers will generate an EMP field inflicting upset and damage on unprotected electronics. …
On April 30, South Korean officials told The Korea Times and YTN TV that North Korea’s test of a medium-range missile on April 29 was not a failure, as widely reported in the world press, because it was deliberately detonated at 72 kilometers altitude. 72 kilometers is the optimum burst height for a 10-Kt warhead making an EMP attack. …
According to South Korean officials, “It’s believed the explosion was a test to develop a nuclear weapon different from existing ones.” Japan’s Tetsuro Kosaka writes in Nikkei, “Pyongyang could be saying, ‘We could launch an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack if things get really ugly.'”
“The April 29 missile launch looks suspiciously like practice for an EMP attack,” Pry wrote. “The missile was fired on a lofted trajectory, to maximize, not range, but climbing to high-altitude as quickly as possible, where it was successfully fused and detonated — testing everything but an actual nuclear warhead.”
This weekend, an editorial published in the North Korean state-run media agency KNCA threatened the White House would be “reduced to ashes.”
The same news agency warned last week that “any military provocation against the DPRK will precisely mean a total war which will lead to the final doom of the US.” DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea.
By Aaron Klein
May 8, 2017 09:00:32 #
(Main)
pafret wrote:
France once was the bastion of Liberté égalité fra... (show quote)
What gets me is that the media keeps portraying this guy as a 'centrist' or 'moderate' and he is not, he is a leftist....as liberal as they come. Back in the 50s France built a bunch of low cost housing projects, which currently house one-sixth the population. They were built originally for white working class families. These families, over time, moved to the suburbs as France imported more and more Muslim immigrant workers, and they now overwhelmingly take up the majority, if not all, of this housing. Which, includes many 'no go' zones. The cities have become too expensive for the middle class, so they move to the suburbs. The rich elites now comprise the majority of the cities populations, and pretty much control their elections. It is the rich elites who employ these Muslim immigrant laborers as maids, nannies, yard workers, pool workers, etc. And, since France does not have an electoral college like we do, the elites in the cities, who love the cheap Muslim immigrant labor control their elections. When one polls the people in the suburbs they find 50%, or more, of the people don't like the direction the country is going in, and do not like the Muslim immigrant population. Thus, the Muslim loving leftist Macron won the election, and France will suffer for it.