We here at Really Right like Rush but don’t listen to him very often. (FYI to Liberals, we don’t get our marching orders from Rush despite your ridiculous notion that we can’t think for ourselves. We like Rush because he believes the way we do about many, but not all things.) This is one occasion where we disagree, at least in part.
Yesterday, Rush spent part of his show talking about the recent report of Apple phones being hacked just by visiting a website with no user intervention. Rush does not dispute that it happened but the where and why are interesting. I am quoting this extensively because most of Rush’s stuff ends-up behind a pay firewall.
Now, last week there was this massive news report. It went way beyond the tech blogs. It went into the Drive-By Media that iPhones been had been hacked en masse for the past number of years. The story was put out by something called Project Zero at Google. Google has a department, a team of people that try to hunt down and find — they’re white hat guys. They’re the good guys.
They try to find malware and hacks and vulnerabilities in computers and hand-held devices, mobile devices so that the people that manufacture those devices can patch the software and continue their security.
And they came out with a story that a massive vulnerability had been found in the iPhone. And that all you had to do was visit a website. It did not name the website. All you had to do was visit a website and virtually everything on your phone was in the hands of bad guys. Your passwords, your key chain, your credit card information, your contacts, your photos, everything. They didn’t tell you which websites, and they didn’t specify the specific years, but they made it sound like it was multiple years, and they made it sound like it only affected iPhones.
And when I first read this, ’cause I don’t believe anything in the media anymore. I just don’t, folks. And Google is a competitor of Apple. I’m not sure this was a factor here, but let me tell you what this ended up being.
It was the ChiComs. It was Chinese websites. And it was every phone. It was Samsung. It was Huawei, it was LG, it was every operating system, and it was the ChiComs targeting Chinese Muslims. You had to log onto a Chinese website for anybody to be able to get into your phone. They knew this, but they only reported it as an iPhone vulnerability, and they made it look like it could be any and every website that anybody would be using every day, and it’s strickly a Chinese issue.
It’s ChiComs trying to find everything they can on these renegade Muslims, the Uyghurs, and wipe ’em out, put ’em in reeducation camps and so forth. Now, this was known, but the Google Project Zero team did not report that aspect of it. Your phone is fine for the most part. The story was way exaggerated.
Rush makes several points, some of which we knew. The Apple vulnerability was discovered by a hacker group employed by Google. This was part of the original story. It is no surprise that China is behind the exploit or that the primary mission of the cyber operation was to go after Muslims in their country; however, I have yet to see a story corroborating Rush’s claim. Out of respect, I’m willing to grant that he is probably correct on this point.
Rush’s second point is weaker to me; namely, that Android phones were similarly hacked. Apple is the one claiming their superiority in security—mobile and PC, over any other operating systems—asserting that they are the best and most secure. It is this point, that they are not, that was the focus of the story. Rush thinks this is tech media bias against Apple, I disagree. Apple should abide by the old axiom of people in glass houses not throwing stones. Apple doesn’t admit to any OS flaws, bugs, or hacks until such issues are outed by third parties. It is their argument from silence that I disagree with. They are using circular reasoning to maintain this claim. Claim 1: Since Apple OS is secure, there are no bugs, hacks, or flaws. Claim 2: Since no bugs, hacks, or flaws exist, Apple OS is the most secure. Therefore Apple can maintain that they are the most secure OS as long as they admit nothing to the contrary.
FAANG is Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google
That China spies on its own people is nothing new. They’ve been doing that since Mao. China and other nations use our electronic gizmos to gather data on us all the time, but to what end? I’m more concerned about the censorship on free speech in this country by the FAANG companies and MS than what other nation-states are doing with my address book and lackluster text messages. The secrets that I have are not in my phone.
The State of California and the SEIU have agreed to a new contract. I thought you should know just how generous your elected representatives have been with your tax money. Some details have not been made public yet but here’s what we know.
Wages
During negotiations, SEIU claimed they wanted a 21 percent increase over three years. As usual, they settled for a fraction of that amount. On the face of it, they claim they got 7 percent over three years. Each increment of this raise takes effect July first (the first day of the new fiscal year.) Actually, it’s less than that.
Two reasons why.
First, a few years back, the State created a new deduction taken from the paychecks of current state workers. This money is to go into a fund earmarked for future retiree medical benefits (sounds vaguely like the Social Security Trust Fund to me.) This fund is incremented over a period of four year and will rise to 3.5 percent of gross pay. The last increment will take effect July 1, 2020. It will go up another 1.2 percent. (see chart below)
Thus the 2.5 percent pay increase July 1, 2020 will actually be a 1.3 percent increase in take home pay (less all the payroll taxes on 2.5 percent “increase”).
Second, the pay increase for the third year, also scheduled to be 2.5 percent may not happen. During negotiations, the State was asking that they be given the right to forego this increase in the event of an economic downturn. Based on the information released thus far, it is unclear if the union agreed to this provision and if so, what the trigger to stop the pay raise will be.
Thus, the actual pay raise over three years may very well be only 3.3 percent; a far cry from the 21 percent the union claimed they were asking for.
Medical Tweak
The union claims that they got $260 a month for anyone on a State sponsored healthcare plan. This is to cover the employee contribution to healthcare. Thus, if only the employee is on the health plan, they would have no employee contribution any more. Once this is implemented, the state would pay 100 percent for individuals.
My question is this, currently my contribution to Kaiser is about $125 a month. Will the state really give me the whole $260 or just pay the $125 and call it good. Oh, for those of you in the private sector, sorry; I know you’re paying lots more than that out of pocket for your share of health insurance.
Geographic Pay
If a state employee lives in any of the following counties: Orange, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Cruz, they will also get a geographic differential of $250 each month.
As we know as conservatives, when a government creates a new benefit, over time it will grow to cover more folks. Geographic Differential pay is such a thing. I was surprised not to see a single San Francisco Bay Area county on this list. This is even more reason to suspect that this new benefit will expand over time.
Concluding Remarks
My observation of this contract is this; it appears that all these extra pay things added to the wages of State employees help the State by not boosting employee retirement (assuming retirement is based solely on salary) while easing the pain of living in such a costly State as California. This seems to be the gentleman’s agreement with the State.
Apple users always swear that their gear is more secure than other operating systems; once again, this is proven to be a lie. The difference between Apple and Microsoft (or Google) is that the other guys are actively looking for security flaws and Apple does not. As we have repeatedly documented on this blog, Apple will only reluctantly admit to a security issue once the issue has been made public, and then only half-heartedly will they acknowledge it. Apple will refuse to fix known issues for years until outed by third parties.
Today another story is out and this one is as bad as it gets. Just by visiting a compromised website, hackers could get the following:
You location in real time, updated every minute
All your passwords
Chat histories on WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage
Address book
Gmail database
In total, 14 bugs were exploited for the iOS attack across five different “exploit chains” – strings of flaws linked together in such a way that a hacker can hop from bug to bug, increasing the severity of their attack each time.
Please note that it was Google that informed Apple of the security flaws which had been exploited in the wild for a mere two and a half years.
An unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked “thousands of users a week” until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google’s external security team.
The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones.
Once hacked, the user’s deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Their location was uploaded every minute; their device’s keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database.
Oh, as usual, it is a British news outlet breaking the story not the American media. As a rule, the UK has better coverage of national news in the United States than our own media. I guess they’re all too busy trying to make stuff up about Trump and Russia instead of doing their jobs. Back in the day, Woodward and Bernstein worked hard to break their story; they would not be contented just to be part of the echo chamber that passes for the mainstream media today.
Oh, there is other hacking news out there today as well.
Teenager hacked government file sharing website known as Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center Safe Access File Exchange (AMRDEC SAFE) Click here for story
Lastly, there is a fair chance your dentist had their data compromised by a ransomware attack. Click here for story.
In their never ending pursuit to identify another class of victims, the Democrat Party has decided to embrace those that reject God. While most of us had thought they did this decades ago, they formalized the arrangement earlier this week by passing a resolution to be welcoming and inclusive of those unwilling to bend their knee in worship of their Creator.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) passed a resolution Saturday praising the values of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans as the “largest religious group within the Democratic Party.”
The resolution, which was unanimously passed at the DNC’s summer meeting on Aug. 24 in San Francisco, Calif., was championed by the Secular Coalition of America, an organization that lobbies on behalf of atheists, agnostics, and humanists on public policy. The group celebrated the DNC’s move as the first time a major party “embraced American nonbelievers.”
“Religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’s values,” said the resolution…
The move comes as Democratic presidential candidates have ramped up their religious rhetoric on the campaign trail, but the party announced it is targeting “nonreligious voters” to try to beat President Trump, who solidified the evangelical vote in 2016.
Political pundits have pointed out Democrats’ so-called God problem in the past and their efforts to solve it.
In 2012, the last election Democrats won, a headline from the convention read: “Democrats boo God.” In 2016, attendees heckled a preacher during the opening prayer. And on Saturday, Democrats took a shot at believers who use “religious liberty” to threaten the civil rights of LGBTQ Americans.
After passage, the Secular Coalition of America issued the following press release.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) this past Saturday embraced American nonbelievers for the first time, adopting a resolution that recognizes their contributions to society and to the Democratic Party.
This move by the DNC, which was unanimous absent one abstention, demonstrates that they are living up to the big-tent inclusive values they regularly espouse, though it also shows they recognize the value of courting the largest, fastest growing religious demographic in the nation. It was first passed in the DNC’s Resolutions Committee on Thursday.
At nearly one quarter of the total U.S. population, nonreligious Americans—one third of which are Democrats and nearly half of which are independent—will represent a sizeable voting bloc in the upcoming election. This resolution marks the first time a major U.S. political party has specifically courted religiously unaffiliated people across the nation.
25 percent of the US population is classed as “Unaffiliated.”
6. Atheists and agnostics account for a minority of all religiously unaffiliated.
Most are secular. Atheists and agnostics account for only about one-quarter (27%) of all religiously unaffiliated Americans. Nearly six in ten (58%) religiously unaffiliated Americans identify as secular, someone who is not religious; 16% of religiously unaffiliated Americans nonetheless report that they identify as a “religious person.”
So, a quarter of a quarter of the US population is atheist, agnostic, pagan, secular, or whatever you want to call it. In real math, that means about 6.25 percent of the nation falls into this bucket.
Given the bombardment of secularism and evolution in our culture, I’m surprised the number is that low.
As always, Democrats don’t care what you believe—or don’t—as long as your first allegiance is to the All Powerful State.
The NSA may be the only government entity that listens to you but the private sector has gone crazy doing the same thing. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all been outed as doing the same type of surveillance.
Listening
Today, a report has surfaced that Apple has fired their Siri transcription company in Ireland with virtually no notice.
Apple is terminating the contracts of 100 of workers who were hired to listen to Siri recordings according to a report from the Guardian.
Last month, Apple was revealed to be sending audio data over to contractors to improve Siri. The contractors would accidentally hear private or personal information sometimes, and a few users were scandalised that this wasn’t made clear when signing up for Siri originally.
The firm has put an abrupt end to the program, leading to mass job loss.
As per the report, more than 300 employees have been fired in one facility in Cork, Ireland, and some have been sent home with less than one week’s notice.
Microsoft is also listening and plans to continue the practice.
After Apple and Google, it turns out Microsoft is also doing the same thing.
According to a report from Motherboard which cites an anonymous contractor, Microsoft is listening in to your Skype and Cortana audio as well. Much like Google and Apple do, the firm sends a little bit of audio to its small army of human contractors around the globe for analysis, ranging between 5 – 10 seconds.
The bone of contention here appears to be that while Microsoft does tell users that some of their audio will be analysed, it leads them to assume that it would be AI-based as opposed to human contractors.
Microsoft terms of service authorize third party folks to listen.
In a statement released to Motherboard, the firm said:
“We’re always looking to improve transparency and help customers make more informed choices. Our disclosures have been clear that we use customer content from Cortana and Skype Translator to improve these products, we engage third party expertise to assist in this process, and we take steps to de-identify this content to protect people’s privacy.”
The Motherboard report reveals that contractors are mean to transcribe up to 300 pieces of audio per hour and are paid between $12 and $14 for it with a max bonus taking it to $15 per hour. Contractors have noted that personal and private information has slipped into these audio snippets as originally reported.
Yesterday, Amazon received national coverage for allowing law enforcement access to Ring video cameras, without any warrant or suspicion of wrongdoing.
Always home, always watching
Amazon-owned doorbell-camera manufacturer Ring has formed partnerships with hundreds of police departments that allow them to automatically request access to footage after the fact, according to a report in The Washington Post.
Ring has arrangements with more than 400 departments, under which they can request recordings within a specific time and area, according to the Post. Ring gives homeowners the option to decline requests, according to the Post.
Police can use a map interface to select the time and geographic range, which will generate an automated email to all users within the range with a message from the department, according to the newspaper.
Ring, as a private-sector enterprise, has found “a clever workaround for the development of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would happen if it was coming from the police or government,” he added.
Ring also sells consumers both external and internal cameras so what keeps law enforcement or other interested parties from viewing the inside of your house in real time? Also, please note the weasel words in the article above; homeowners are given “the option to decline the requests.” This sounds like a one-time, blanket terms of service option given when the system is first being configured. If so, is a third-party installer giving Ring (Amazon) that permission as part of the equipment setup or the actual resident of the dwelling? This point might be potential legal fodder in the not too distant future.
Bottom Line
If you are on the Internet using any program, device, or service, then rest assured that you are under surveillance by someone; the only question is whether the other party is a program or person. Most folks just want to legally separate you from your money but others harbor more nefarious intentions. If you own a smartphone then Apple, Google, and Microsoft know where you live, work, and shop. If you own a car, then the automakers and others in their industry know where you’ve been in your car.
Amish–the only folks living “off the grid”
If you truly want privacy, build a Faraday Cage in your home or become Amish. Trust me, your digital footprint is way bigger than your carbon one and much more likely to be dangerous to your liberty.
Thanks to Facebook, I frequently get to see posts from “the other side” no not the physically dead, just the spiritually dead. One person that I frequently see posts from is a retired Liberal relative of my wife. Since she’s family, I normally show restraint and don’t respond—except on two occasions. Over the weekend I saw a post that I thought deserves rebuttal. Instead of doing it on Facebook and giving her the satisfaction that she hit a nerve, I thought I would respond here instead.
As it turns out, the article is three years old anyway. That’s another gripe I have with Facebook, you don’t know if the post is fresh or years old. It just shows up in your feed. This gem is from GQ Magazine. Before getting into the details, I have two thoughts. First, why is this in a magazine that is supposedly, Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ)? Second, it’s written by a woman saying disparaging things about a successful businessman. Am I the only one finding this ironic and counter to the stated purpose of the publication?
The article invokes as proof, a fellow named Rick Alan Ross. Ross is identified in the article as “America’s leading cult expert.” Sorry Mr. Ross, but I’ve never heard of you so I’m having doubts about your credentials. As a diligent guy, I did what any enterprising fellow would do, I looked you up on Wikipedia.
Ross’ first dust-up with a cult (as he defines it) was with a group of Messianic Jews. Being that Bob Dylan is also a Messianic Jew, I’m not seeing the offense that he took to these folks. I guess Jews trying to convince other Jews that Jesus is their Messiah is offensive to a Jew that rejects Jesus. Ross identifies as Jewish but in my experience such identification is often more cultural than religious. Oh, Ross is described as having “a personal hatred for all religious cults.” He also was a prominent figure in the government’s treatment and subsequent assault on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas.
Using Ross as their source, GQ identifies three marks of the Cult of Trump.
Sign I: His campaign is fueled by charisma.
For his followers, the appeal of Trump is Trump himself: his take-no-bullshit attitude, his (greatly embellished) only-in-America success story, his apparent business savvy. His policies, which are largely vague or nonexistent, aren’t the main draw (his 180 on immigration, one of the defining issues of his campaign, doesn’t appear to bother his supporters). And that’s where he perfectly fits the cult archetype.
“The single most salient feature of a cult is a person who has become, essentially, an object of worship,” Ross says. They’re the “defining element of the group,” the heart of the movement.
This is the first of several prima facia arguments put forth to bolster this narrative. Every successful person in politics has some measure of charisma. I guess compared to Hillary Clinton, Trump would win in that category.
But Trump an object of worship? Really? Heck no. Do I want him to be successful? Yes, but worship?
Ross and the GQ author don’t define a cult in terms of theology but power and control. I see nothing on his website condemning Communism or Socialism, if control is an identifying mark of a cult or false religion then both these political systems should qualify in spades.
Why is it that Liberals think we are all a bunch of mind-numbed robots that hang on someone’s every syllable? Did it ever occur to Ross that Trump says the things that we already feel and believe? This article was written after Trump was made the nominee at the Republican convention but before the General election. Our hope at the time, which has generally been true since he took office, is that Trump would be disruptive to the good old boy system in Washington and that he would undo the attacks on Christianity and traditional American values perpetrated by Barack Obama.
Trump is trying to do things differently. Do I always agree with him? No, generally I support him and want him to be successful. Frankly, I’m more interested in what he actually does and not so much what he says. However, I do enjoy that he confronts Democrats on Twitter and irritates the snot out of them.Prior to Trump, Democrats did whatever they wanted, and Republicans would cower in the corner in fear of what the media would say if they responded. Trump has shown what we always knew about Democrats, they have no morals, principles, or backbone. Their ideology is without foundation and is only one slogan thick. They can’t stand it when someone pushes back at them. Which brings us to the second point.
Sign II: He’s a raging narcissist.
“Cult leaders are most often narcissists,” Ross explains. “They see themselves as the center of the known universe, and everyone revolves around them.” Trump, he says, fits the warning signs of narcissistic personality disorder—an exaggerated sense of self-importance, preoccupation with success, power and brilliance, behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner—to a T (for Trump, probably). Lest we forget, Trump says he went to the “best school in the world,” has “the world’s greatest memory,” and will be “the greatest jobs president God has ever created.”
Trump has a big ego, but so does everybody in politics. Humble people don’t run for office. It is true that Trump doesn’t care what his opponents think. It is on this point that comparisons to Donald Trump diverge from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold caved completely but Trump has stood tall in the face of assault after assault.
If you want a raging narcissist, look no further that Barack Obama. The man can’t give a speech without using, “I”, “me”, “my” at least a hundred times in 20 minutes; even if its at someone’s funeral. Everything he said and did was about himself.
If this accusation was true of Trump, trust me, the media would be all over it. Trump has a big ego, but he doesn’t talk in terms of himself but what he thinks is best for America. That is a huge difference.
Sign III: What he says is always right. Even when it’s not.
“You just can’t put that material in front of a true believer and it has any effect,” Ortega says. “And I think people are seeing the same thing with Trump. Trump creates this sort of field, this bubble, that the people inside of it are just incapable of seeing these things as those on the outside.”
That reality distortion field is in full force with Trump’s supporters. Despite his bankruptcies and spectacular business failings (Trump Vodka, anyone? No?), the notion that he’s a successful businessman who would bring the same acuity to running the country is one of the pillars of his campaign. And though nearly 80 percent of the things he says are outright lies, he manages to pin the blame on the “dishonest” and “biased” media. Many of his followers, already distrustful of mainstream news outlets, accept whatever rationalization he provides, no matter how outlandish.
Talk about irony. This point is where any attempts to portray Trump supporters as cultists hits the wall and explodes. Liberals are nonresponsive to facts and information. They can only argue from emotion and claim that facts are different than truth. (If I have my way, Joe Biden will never live down that claim.)
The biggest shocker to folks in Washington was that after he was inaugurated, Trump began to implement the things he promised in his campaign. What he said is what he tried to do. Granted, he has met with much resistance, but he has followed through where he could.
I don’t get the meme that everything Trump says is a lie. I can understand if Liberals don’t like 80 percent of what he wants to do but… this lie thing is without substance. I tried to look up so called “fact check” stuff on Trump and the one thing I noticed was they kept moving the goal posts and making false equivalences. Trump shoots from the hip quite often but generally his recall is good; compared to Joe Biden, Trump is a genius in this department.
Liberals have a preset template that they use to filter anything Trump, they won’t consider anything contrary to their presuppositions. Thus, they reject any evidence contrary to what they want to be true. As previously documented here, the repeated accusation that Trump is a racist is exhibit one in this regard. It is untrue but they keep saying it anyway.
Conservatives care about a man’s character not their skin color. Liberals would think that since I like Trump and I happen to have pale skin that I must be a racist. This is untrue and intellectually lazy. In fact, such a statement is racist not me.
Ok want an example. I’ll give you two.
Meghan Markle—the babe that married Prince Harry I had no interest in her racial make-up. Why would I? I know she is attractive and had some interest in being in movies. I have previously blogged about her and the false conversion into Anglicanism not because she trusted in Christ but to please the Queen mother. It never occurred to me that she might be all or partly black until I read it in some British tabloid. My reaction was oh, that’s interesting trivia, as I wondered why it mattered. For some reason, its a big deal in England.
Kamala Harris Another nice-looking babe, but I don’t like her because of her politics. She has “San Francisco values” and was a horrible Attorney General in California. As AG, she refused to enforce the laws that she personally didn’t like. In the Senate, she was no upgrade from Barbara Boxer. She is all in on rainbow people and murdering the unborn thru all nine months of pregnancy and expects my tax dollars to pay for it. It never occurred to me to inquire about her race. I really don’t care. It wasn’t until I read articles about former Assembly Speaker and ex-SF Mayor Willie Brown fornicating with her in exchange for boosting her political career that I ever read anything about her skin color. Again, prior to this year, it never occurred to me to inquire on her race. It was her character that I disagreed with. She is wrong on policy.
I believe this is true of most people including President Trump. Only Democrats look at people in terms of their group membership not as individuals.
Mr. Ross and the author are wrong that followers of Donald Trump are cultists. We want a change in the direction of the country, especially after the destruction wrought to the Republic by Barack Obama. Trump is a supporter of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment (for the most part), and will give us better judges on the Supreme Court than anyone else in either Party. So, what he says may be entertaining but we support him for what he has done. He has done his best to keep his campaign promises because he meant what he said, that is both rare and refreshing in politics.
Oh, on his website, Mr. Ross has a copy of the GQ article with a disclaimer at the bottom.
[Note: Historically, a destructive cult leader, such as Jim Jones, David Koresh or Charles Manson has no meaningful accountability. Destructive cult leaders are typically not elected and therefore not subject to the checks and balances of a democracy, such as the judicial and congressional branches of government. For this reason an elected President of the United States (POTUS) cannot be seen as a destructive cult leader. Donald Trump may have a cult-like following and possess certain character traits similar to a cult leader, but he cannot be seen simply as a cult leader, without careful qualification. Donald Trump was elected and must be reelected to continue as POTUS and as POTUS he is accountable to the American people, our elected government and the Constitution of the United States, which he publicly swore to uphold at his inauguration. — Rick Alan Ross]
Only in a world where wrong is right and up is down could anyone believe that Trump is bad for Israel but that’s the latest claim of smoldering fecal matter published by The Atlantic.
Please note the fact claims of the author in these paragraphs.
The upshot is that Jewish organizations have lost control of the narrative on Israel. Trump’s actions and statements about Jews and Israel have little to do with the Jewish people—they reflect the mode and priorities of his largely Christian, right-wing base. In practice, Washington’s bipartisan consensus on Israel mostly remains intact, but the story about Israel has changed radically. Jews have become characters in a larger political drama over Israel and anti-Semitism, two of the issues they have historically cared about most. The endless cycles of outrage are not meant to benefit Jews, and they’re not really about Jews.
Trump, in particular, has changed the bipartisan playbook on Israel. The president repeatedly singles out Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who have been critical of Israel and were recently barred from entering the country at Trump’s urging. When Trump says these women hate Israel, hate Jews, and are anti-Semites, that gives permission to “the president’s people to say, ‘We don’t care about traditional ways of approaching the U.S.-Israel relationship,’” Solow said. “It also frees up all the president’s opponents in the Jewish community to say, ‘You know what? All the rules have changed.’” As a result, politically conservative and progressive Jews, who might have once found common ground on the Israel issue, are constantly at one another’s throats.
President Trump is right to go after the haters of Israel but when he defends the Jewish state, Liberal Jews are somehow offended. Like Trump, I don’t get it. The Democrats have thrown the Jews overboard and as long as the they remain Liberals first and Jews second, the Democrats will let them have a seat at the table…for now.
Folks, the followers of Islam were brought into this country by President Obama in the millions, not for the purpose of finding a better life in America, but to colonize our nation and expand the caliphate. Everywhere you turn, Liberal places are allowing special rules and practices to accommodate the worshippers of Allah. Liberals are afraid of them.
Please don’t get me wrong, I favor anyone from anywhere coming to the United States, but only those that want to be Americans. If they want to turn America into a place like the third world hellhole, they came from then go home. If you didn’t come here for freedom—religious and economic—then stay home.
Truth is the Liberals are using the people who practice Islam as a way to teardown the beliefs and institutions derived from Christianity; ironically, Christianity and Western Culture are the only thing that can stop the spread of Islam.
Liberals think the enemy of my enemy is my friend but the analogy they should really be concerned with is the one about giving the scorpion a ride across the flooded river or in this case Atlantic Ocean. The uneasy alliance they have made with Islam will—if they ever succeed—be their undoing.
Trump is pointing out that Jew haters are allowed to spew their hatred and the Democrat leadership is silent.Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota are Democrats, not only in good standing but along with the other two, are the new face of the Democrat Party. Nancy Pelosi may be Speaker until they carry her out of the House Chambers feet first but she in not running the show. Nancy is just the crazy aunt in the basement.
Dear Nancy, the generation coming up behind you believes all that crap you have been spewing since you guys took over the Party that fateful summer in Chicago back in 1972. Funny, you are now the stale generation of out of touch leaders. How do you like being replaced by younger and more Leftist children. Call it Karma or what goes around, but your goose is cooked.
Trump may be upsetting the traditional apple cart of Jewish folks trying to play both sides of the aisle (a lament of this article quoted above) but the truth is those days were over when Obama took-over the reins of power a decade ago.
If Trump is guilty of anything concerning the Jews and Israel, it is this, choose this day whom you will follow, one Party leads to life and the other to your destruction. Or as Bob Dylan said it many years ago, “When you gonna wake-up?”
Trump is right to defend Israel. Trump is right to attack Tlaib and Omar. Sadly, Nancy Pelosi has put herself in a box that to chasten these two racist idiots will make her appear to agree with Trump and she can’t have that; it would be her undoing. Perish the thought that the adults would discipline the children. If Nancy slapped down these two, it would open up a world where both Parties might work together, and the Democrats have so poisoned the well (or swamp if you prefer) that they can’t have that be an outcome. Better to get rid of Trump than do their jobs.
Trump is right to attack these two babes. They are friends of terrorists and murders and the hate they spread is a deadly toxin. The Democrats won’t clean-up their own House and Trump is just pointing that out. The only conclusion that rational people can draw is that the Democrats must really agree with Tlaib and Omar.How is he the racist by pointing it out?
What do you get when you cross an Ikea display, a tiny house, and the private sector?
That’s the proposal from new startup Rent the Backyard. The company is tackling rising home prices in the San Francisco-Bay Area by building backyard studio apartments, and splitting the rental profits with homeowners.
“This is a long-term partnership that we have with the homeowner,” Rent the Backyard Co-Founder Brain Bakerman told Yahoo Finance during a recent interview.
Homeowners can make $10,000 to $20,000 in additional income each year, according to the company.
If, you own a home in the Bay Area, have a 30 x 30 area, and you live in your home most of the time, then you could take part in this experiment in affordable housing.
In recent years, math has become a weapon of social and political warfare. Often it is abused to promote junk science like the myth of global cooling, warming, err…climate change or whatever the hell they’re claiming this week. Numerical manipulation is also used as a tool to find new and creative reasons to get more grant money pumped into academia.
68 Percent Error
Here’s an example. Did you know that 68 percent of the universe does not exist and never did?
Yes, it’s still the gospel if you look on the NASA website, but there’s no such thing. Two years ago, a study was published that proved it is a false theory but it is still taught as true in schools all over the world.
Scientists believe that enigmatic dark energy make up 68% of the universe. But according to a Hungarian-American team, it may not exist at all. The team publish their results in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers believe that standard models of the universe fail to take account of its changing structure, but that once this is done the need for dark energy disappears.
Dark matter is now thought to make up 27% of the content of universe (in contrast ‘ordinary’ matter amounts to only 5%). After observing the explosions called as Ia supernovae, scientists concluded that dark energy, made up 68% of the cosmos, and is responsible for expansion of the universe.
In the new work, the researchers, officially led by PhD student Gábor Rácz of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, explained that models of cosmology particularly rely on approximations that ignore its structure, and where matter is assumed to have a uniform density. They questioned the conventional concept of existence of dark energy and suggest an alternative explanation.
Dr László Dobos, co-author of the paper, and currently working at Eötvös Loránd University, explains: “Einstein’s equations of general relativity that describe the expansion of the universe are so complex mathematically that for a hundred years no solutions accounting for the effect of cosmic structures have been found. We know from very precise supernova observations that the universe is accelerating, but at the same time we rely on coarse approximations to Einstein’s equations which may introduce serious side-effects, such as the need for dark energy, in the models designed to fit the observational data.”
If you keep rooting around on the subject, what you find is that scientists studying the universe rounded the speed of light and took other shortcuts in their math that introduced an error so big that they had to invent 68 percent more mass in the universe called “dark matter”; theoretical stuff that could not be observed in any way, just to account for the error.
Labor Department Revision
The US Department of Labor this week offered their own version of “Dark Matter” revisions to their universe.
This week, the US Department of Labor did some similar math adjustments and made 501,000 jobs that they said had been created by the Trump Administration disappear.
The Labor Department revised down total job gains from April 2018 to March 2019 by 501,000, the agency said Wednesday, the largest downward revision in a decade.
The agency’s annual benchmark revision is based on state unemployment insurance records that reflect actual payrolls while its earlier estimates are derived from surveys. The preliminary figure could be revised further early next year.
The Department maketh up and the Department taketh away, blessed be the math of the Department.
Folks, color me skeptical about this revision. I think the Labor Department has been cooking the books since Bush was President and they certainly were when Obama was President so why the change in methodology for just one year?Oh, coincidentally, this revision comes when Democrats finally figured-out that the only prayer they have in 2020 is if the economy goes down before the election—which they also are coincidentally trying to make happen.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” as my dear departed granny used to say. Why stop at one year? If the Labor Department wants to change their methodology let’s go back, say ten years and see what has really been going on.
Bureaucracy First
Folks this is an illustration of what some folks dumbly call the “Deep State”. Personally I hate that term. I think what they are trying to say is that, in a sense, the government bureaucracy is so large and unwieldly that it is a force unto itself that can’t be led anywhere its career management is unwilling to go. Above all things, they are statists and will defend their institution from any outside forces of change.
Trump is an insurgent and as such needs to be taken down a few notches and shown who is running things. The boys in Labor decided that the time is ripe to make their contribution to the cause and it’s substantial. Trump has wed his fate to that of the economy and now is the time to stick him with it.
As I have stated before Trump is more of a cheerleader for the economy than he is an actual owner of its success or failure. The Market is overvalued and needs correction but how and what will trigger that is yet to happen. Sadly, the possible catalysts of correction are a target rich environment. The real question is will Trump advocate interfering with the Market (like Bush) or allow it to correct itself. Given that Democrats will not willingly help Trump, as Republicans were willing to do for Obama, Trump may have no choice but to let the Market correct naturally —which in the long run is the best outcome.
I’m just surprised that this story has gotten so little attention. Are Democrats really so busy fighting amongst themselves that they can’t take time to pummel Trump on his claim that “this is the greatest economy ever” or are they just so tone-deaf that it doesn’t matter to them. On the other hand, in the Dem’s defense, the revision was a loss of private sector, non-union jobs so maybe they don’t count anyways.
From my point of view, this was a real body blow to the President but I can’t find anything from pundits on either side of the political divide make hay about this revision.
So if Trump doesn’t lash-out at his own Dept. of Labor on Twitter then the media doesn’t care? What gives with that?
Folks, having this blog is a hobby and frankly therapy for me to vent about the world. I don’t always get to everything as quickly as I would like but an article published recently by The Atlantic “The Future of the City Is Childless” really deserves your attention.
Sadly, the article is not about a dystopian future but a current reality. I highly recommend that you read it. The thesis is that big cities are for single, working people with careers and suburbs and rural areas are for families.
New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.
In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.
Cities were once a place for families of all classes. The “basic custom” of the American city, wrote the urbanist Sam Bass Warner, was a “commitment to familialism.” Today’s cities, however, are decidedly not for children, or for families who want children. As the sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark put it, they are “entertainment machines” for the young, rich, and mostly childless. And this development has crucial implications—not only for the future of American cities, but also for the future of the U.S. economy and American politics.
But if big cities are shedding people, they’re growing in other ways—specifically, in wealth and workism. The richest 25 metro areas now account for more than half of the U.S. economy, according to an Axios analysis of government data. Rich cities particularly specialize in the new tech economy: Just five counties account for about half of the nation’s internet and web-portal jobs. Toiling to build this metropolitan wealth are young college graduates, many of them childless or without school-age children; that is, workers who are sufficiently unattached to family life that they can pour their lives into their careers.
Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell. It’s a coast-to-coast trend: In Washington, D.C., the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined. Meanwhile, San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.
Again, please read the rest of the article. I think this explains—in part—some of the divide in our country on many issues. The populated areas that favor singlehood are very self-focused. In a culture that is very present oriented anyway and values that “new is better” (after all that value works well when applied to technology), is it any wonder that, God, family, and children—future oriented values—are distant to them? Feelings and immediate gratification are incongruent to a future orientation.
Given what you’ve read above, is it any wonder that this headline is in the news today?
Nothing complicates career and immediate gratification more than pregnancy, consequences are so messy. Once you’ve committed to the proposition that life is all about you, it can be jarring to have that attitude challenged.
If the future is childless then how can there be a future?
