I’m a devout capitalist. I won’t deny it. I have no problem with people making lots of money. These three men named here are businessmen who took risks and got rich. The current challenge in the world is with wealthy people using their wealth to achieve political change. It goes against the very American concept of one man one vote. Politicians who act on bribes are the evil ones, not the folks who offer the bribes.

HUGE CAVEAT: This is satire. No claims to knowledge here! A little levity to make fun of some of the stupidity of our self proclaimed leaders. When you were nine years old, you might have been catching Pokemon or collecting POGs. That’s not the case for Robby Jennings. Jennings, a third-grader at Hamilton Elementary, was called up to the big leagues this week, as the GOP asked him to draw up their new tax reform plan. “I tried to make the taxes real fair and real good for everyone,” Jennings said. “I cut some of the taxes but left some of the others. I moved some things around. It is real different now but not too different, just sorta like, medium different, I guess.”(1 comment)

It’s “call to action” time. This is one that you need to take some time to contact your US Senators and Congressmen. We all know that our government spends a lot of our money on “research”. Some of the more bizarre examples include $3 million to find out how long shrimp can run on a treadmill! Or how about the $315K to figure out if playing FarmVille on Facebook helps people make friends? Or the $300K to study how people ride bicycles? The list goes on and on. Sen Rand Paul and other have introduced a law to allow we citizens to read and use the research that we paid for. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, or FASTR (S. 1701, H.R. 3427) has sat in the House and Senate for four years. It’s time to get this put into law.(1 comment)

There was a time in my life where I was very active in Republican party politics. It was fun, eye opening and disgusting, pretty much all at the same time. Learned a lot, made some great friends, and exposed me to the reality that is party politics. The Mitch McConnell and Steve Bannon arguments are nothing new in politics. I’ve been hearing those arguments for decades. The McConnell types would always argue that “if you don’t win you can’t do anything” and would argue against candidates with principles and ideals. The Bannon types would argue that if candidates with principles don’t win, what have you really won? Both arguments have merits. The majority party makes the rules. Is a bad Republican better than a good Democrat if it means a Republican Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader? Let’s bring it closer to home. Your local Board of Elections is where integrity of the voting process begins. The head of most local Boards of Elections are appointed locally by the party of the Governor. I personally went with the principles wing of my local party. It helped me sleep at night.

The Vegas shooting has fallen off the radar screen of most of the mainstream media. But then that’s common in America. We move on very quickly. Who even talks about the Houston storm? Florida’s hurricane? Puerto Rico? There are more of the unanswered questions being answered in Vegas, and the link below actually has kept track of them from the beginning and is keeping track of the questions and the answers. It’s a good reference. Of course the conspiracy theories continue to grow, and the “false flag” arguments seem to grow by the day. False flag arguments resonate with people because it’s well known that our government has conducted lots of them over the years. Usually though the false flags that our government runs are foreign efforts to affect foreign governments. It has only been since 9/11 that we’ve seen an increase in false flag operations domestically, with most of them to support the notion that we have lots of domestic terrorists and that our FBI and DHS are doing a “crackerjack” job of stopping them and that they just need a little more money and power to prevent more of them. In my experience, if you are looking for a false flag, you need to start at the end of what happened and see who wins. The “what” of the event is mere theater. The result will help you determine what the false flag is about. In the case of Vegas, I’d suggest you look at who sells metal detectors and other security devices for casinos and hotels. There is a whole lot of money about to be spent to “secure” hotels and casinos. Look for a TSAesque setup in the hotels and casinos not only in Vegas but in mass venues everywhere.…

The “what” of North Korea’s nuclear weapons is a known thing. It’s a copy of a 1960’s Polaris missile. An old US design. This design was copied by Israel, France, Russia and China; probably even India. It is also the Israeli Jericho 2 design, copied from the Polaris A1 design. The UK also had it in their older nuclear submarines. The good news is that the warhead does not separate from the missiles’ main body, so it’s easy to intercept. The re-entry platform is quite crude. The bad news is that with 150kt yield, it’s still dangerous. What puzzles most analysts is how fast North Korea got from rudimentary designs to this latest improved version. In other words, who has been helping them. The notion that it’s Iran is pretty bizarre. Iran doesn’t have a nuclear bomb. It seem to make more sense to look at who does have them and see who would have an interest in North Korea having one too. This site below makes a strong argument that it’s China. This is the part of the post that drops down from knowledge to mere information. It’s a good argument, but for now I don’t know. You would think our zillion dollar intelligence agencies would have an answer. If you are a conspiracy minded person, you might be inclined to believe that they do know.

Imagine if one of our allies in the world acquired a few thousand acres of land in the US. Then they brought in their military to this area and spent the next 14 years training and equipping a group like black lives matter or Antifa to overthrow our country? I imagine most Americans would be very upset with our “ally”. Well, Israel has been training and equipping the Kurds in northern Iraq to do just that thing since 2003. An ally training another ally to fight another ally. What’s really sad is that we’ve pretty much ignored that. The European press reported this in 2003. A few more reports since then. Yesterday’s media reported that it’s moved on to a much bigger issue than mere rifles, machine guns and artillery. They are actually training them to fly F16s! Other than the sheer stupidity of the US allowing this, we are the ones who give F16s to Israel. Foreign military sales and arms proliferation laws are very clear on how the countries that get our equipment can use it. They specifically prohibit their being given to someone else. The US (who never should have been in Syria) has declared that we’ve stopped the CIA from fighting in Syria. Are we allowing Israel to be our proxy to continue the war?

Foreign language speakers in America have always existed. Heck we had translators to deal with the Indians. Immigrants to our country usually lived amongst those who spoke their native language. History shows all sorts of areas in cities where the historic culture prevailed. Growing up in Chicago, my grandparents were first generation immigrants from Germany.…

Anytime there is some heinous disaster, we fixate on wanting to find out why. In the case of airplane or train or vehicle disasters it makes sense in a way. If it’s a mechanical problem, we want the manufacturers to make such repairs so it doesn’t happen again. In the case of human errors, the motives to figure out “why” it happens has many different motivations. When guns are used, the quest to discover the motivations are always political. Those on the left always want to use the disaster to effect more fund raising from the rabid anti gun crowd. For them, a white male Republican who hates Democrats would be their ideal shooter. Those on the right want the shooter to be a crazed and rabid anti American radical. It helps their fundraising too. Both sides are incredibly confused right now. There aren’t enough facts out there to make any instant conclusions, and both sides know that in a couple of weeks the outrage will die down. What happens if President Trump was right, and this guy was merely “evil”?…

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, we were all sold on the notion of nuclear powered energy. Cheap, clean and unlimited supplies of electricity. The idea boomed and for a while it seemed that the world loved the idea. In the US the love of nuclear power has dimmed, but in the rest of the world it continues to boom. There are 450 plants around the world, with more being built. The US is trying to build more but the construction in the US in incredibly expensive and we no longer have a domestic manufacturer since the Toshiba/Westinghouse debacle. From my perspective the challenge has always been handling the nuclear waste. Trillions of dollars have been spent on all sorts of schemes to reuse, recycle and even just store the stuff. We Americans were extorted out of $36 billion to fund the construction of the Yucca Mountain storage facility via our electric bills. This was supposed to be safe storage for 1 million years. The Obama administration stopped the potential use of the place after it was built. Although this article is written by a Greenpeace activist, it’s a good overview of Japan’s challenges in storing waste. It explains why their last disaster could have been worse. With the closing of Yucca Mountain, waste continues to be stored in America’s power sites, perhaps waiting for a disaster.…