RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – A specialist in agricultural economics offered assurances to a House panel that the nation’s farming industry has made significant advances and is well-positioned to endure any potential terrorist attack on the food supply.

Brian Williams, from Mississippi State University, told members of the House Subcommittee for Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications that diversity of production across the broad country offers some protection from any assault.

“Upon examining past incidences of disruptions in production and trade across a variety of commodities, the U.S. agricultural sector has demonstrated a remarkable resilience,” Williams told the panel. “In most cases, it would be difficult for a terrorist to inflict damage on a large enough scale to have a lasting detrimental impact on the U.S. economy.”

If a terrorist were somehow to succeed in inflicting large-scale damage, Williams said, “the agricultural industry has proven that it can recover quickly from most threats. With the cooperation of individual industry groups, state governments and the federal government in devising plans to respond to potential terror attacks or natural disasters, evidence suggests that damage from such disasters can be mitigated.”

Williams told lawmakers there are several things to consider in attempting to predict a terrorist attack on animal agriculture. If the damage is localized to a single county or even multi-county area, the impact will likely be minimal.

“One benefit of agriculture is that production is spread over a wide area,” he said. “As a result, natural disasters and other disruptions to production are quite common but typically have minimal impacts on the economy and markets.”

Williams cited a snowstorm that hit Nebraska and Iowa on Feb. 2 that hit much of Nebraska and Iowa, preventing cattle from being transported from feedlots to packers, all but shutting down the meat-packing industry for two days.

Mr. Flynn is New Mexico’s secretary of environment.
The bright yellow water that gushed from Colorado’s Gold King mine and into the Animas River last summer has dissipated, but the environmental disaster continues downstream. An estimated 880,000 pounds of lead and other metals poured out of the Gold King in August when the Environmental Protection Agency fumbled a construction project and blew out the mine’s plug.

This water raced down the Animas River in mountainous Colorado, and then meandered gradually through my state of New Mexico, the territory of the Navajo Nation and Utah, before dumping into Lake Powell. Geography is important here: The slower the flow, the more that heavy metals drop out of the water and into the riverbed.

From the start, the EPA bungled its response to the spill. The first call alerting New Mexico that contaminated water was on its way didn’t even come from the agency. The water-quality manager of the Southern Ute Tribe, who live in Colorado right on the border with New Mexico, contacted my department with a warning on Aug. 6.

The New Mexico Environment Department quickly dispatched technical staff to take advance water samples, to establish a water-quality baseline. The Animas River is much more than a kayaking spot or a fishing hole for New Mexicans. The drinking water of eight communities—about 90,000 people—is drawn directly from the river, which also sustains crops and livestock, and supports thousands of people’s livelihoods.

After failing to alert New Mexico promptly, the EPA to a large extent left the states and tribes downstream to fend for themselves. No one from the EPA’s regional office in Dallas showed up in New Mexico for nearly a week, by which time the plume had passed. New Mexico’s representative to the EPA’s Incident Command Center in Colorado reported that she was shut out of closed-door meetings where decisions were made.

When EPA staff did finally arrive in New Mexico on Aug. 9, they were rotated out of the state every few days. This led to redundant briefings and inconsistent execution. One EPA communications officer arrived in New Mexico with no capability to text, email or dispatch photos from the field.

As the spill wound its way downstream, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy repeatedly went on camera to say that the agency would hold itself to a “higher standard.” Instead it engaged in a careful campaign of minimization and misdirection. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Prosecutors on Monday said Mr. Pugh, who served as an Air Force mechanic from 1986 to 1990, became increasingly radical after he watched Islamic State’s beheading and training videos online. He allegedly posted comments on Facebook supporting the terrorist group, connected with other sympathizers online and told his co-workers that Islamic State needed airplane mechanics.”

NEW YORK—The government’s case against a U.S. Air Force veteran accused of trying to join Islamic State could hinge on whether jurors believe his interest in the terrorist group amounts to criminal activity or is instead protected by his free-speech rights.Tairod Pugh, a 48-year-old U.S. citizen, may have watched Islamic State propaganda, expressed offensive views and shown interest in the terrorist group, but “none of this is illegal,” his lawyer said to 12 jurors Monday during opening statements.

“In this country, we don’t punish a person for his thoughts,” Mr. Pugh’s lawyer Eric Creizman said.

Mr. Pugh, who on Monday was wearing a shirt and tie with a black cardigan and khaki pants, faces one charge of attempting to provide material support to terrorists and one charge of obstruction of justice. If convicted, Mr. Pugh faces​up to 35 years in prison. Mr. Pugh has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Mr. Pugh’s trial kicked off Monday to a packed courtroom in Brooklyn federal court. Mr. Pugh is among the first two suspected Islamic State sympathizers in the country to go to trial; another trial has been ongoing in Phoenix for two weeks. In total, more than 80 Americans have been arrested since early 2014 on charges related to Islamic State.

Legal and national security experts are closely watching these cases to see how U.S. counterterrorism efforts have adapted to the threat of Islamic State, which has distinguished itself from terrorist groups like al Qaeda by heavily recruiting members through social media. Mr. Pugh’s trial is expected to last two weeks. CONTINUE AT SITE

The campus wars aren’t really about race. Race and the rest of the identity politics roster are the engine for transforming an academic environment into an activist environment.

The average campus already skews left, but it maintains the pretense of serving an educational purpose. The demands put forward on various campuses begin with racial privileges, but do not end there. These demands call for politicizing every department, the mandatory political indoctrination of all students and faculty, and the submission of non-political academic departments to activist political ones.

The campus wars are a declaration that activist non-academic departments that offer identity politics analysis while contributing nothing and which often owe their existence to campus clashes from a previous generation, should dominate all areas of life and thought at every university.

Imagine if physics majors rioted and demanded that every single area of study on campus had to incorporate theoretical physics and hire physics majors. That is exactly what is happening with identity politics studies. It’s a naked power grab that has the potential to redefine academia as we know it.

While black students are the public face of the campaign, behind them are embedded faculty radicals like Melissa Click whose abuses recently led to her firing from the University of Missouri. Click’s body of work, gender, race and sexuality analyses of popular culture, is fairly typical of the activist faculty behind the power grab. Media studies is often confused with journalism, but the two have little in common. Media studies has become a guide to politicizing culture by viewing it through the intersectional lens.

Something amazing has happened in California. First, a brief background: Crime rates across the state, after a long period of steady decline, had reached fifty-year lows in 2014. Then, that November, a 60 percent majority of California voters—presumably incapable of accepting such good news without a measure of collective guilt—decided that it would be a really enlightened idea to pass Proposition 47, a ballot initiative bearing the cheery name “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.” The purpose of this measure was to downgrade many types of drug possession and property crimes from felonies (punishable by more than a year in prison) to misdemeanors (which often entail no prison time at all). For the benefit of squeamish skeptics, the self-assured proponents of Prop 47 condescended to explain that these reduced penalties would not only alleviate prison overcrowding, but would also make California’s streets safer by placing drug offenders into warm-and-fuzzy treatment and counseling programs, rather than into disagreeable prison cells. If you think this sounds like a familiar old tune, you’re quite correct. It was #1 on the left-wing hit parade throughout the 1960s, when it became the theme song of skyrocketing crime rates across the United States. And now the Golden Oldie is back, in the Golden State.

The tangible results of Prop 47 were both immediate and breathtaking. Within a year, there were some 14,000 fewer inmates in California’s state prisons and local jails, just as the Proposition’s backers had promised.

But the other half of their promise—improved public safety—somehow failed to materialize. In 2015:

Violent crime increased (above 2014 levels) in every one of California’s 10 largest cities, while property crime increased in 9 of the 10.
Of 66 California cities whose crime trends were analyzed in depth, 49 saw their violent crime rates increase—usually by at least 10 percent.
Forty-eight of those same 66 California cities saw their property crime rates rise—and in half of those cases, the increase was 10 percent or greater. A typical case was San Francisco, where theft of merchandise from automobiles increased by 47 percent, auto theft rose by 17 percent, and robberies were up 23 percent.
The property crime rates for California cities as a whole increased, on average, by 116.9 offenses per 100,000 residents. By contrast, in states that hadn’t passed Prop 47 or anything like it, the corresponding rates decreased by 29.6 offenses per 100,000 residents.

President Obama is boxed in a state of paralysis—more so than typical lame-duck presidents.

His hard-left politics have insidiously eroded the Democratic Party, which has lost both houses of Congress and the vast majority of the state legislatures, state elected offices, and governorships. Obama has redefined the black vote, as a necessary, no-margin-of-error 95% bloc majority to offset his similar creation of an increasingly monolithic 65% bloc white vote. We are no longer individual voters, but, in Chicago-politics style, merely faceless “Latinos,” “Asians,” “African-Americans,” “gays,” “women,” and now “whites.”

Obama issues a new initiative—and the nation snoozes. He wastes the day on the golf links—and the nation snoozes. He smear his critics, invites a rapper to the White House whose latest album cover has a dead white judge lying in front of the White House—and the nation snoozes. He cozies up to America’s enemies and snubs our friends—and the nation snoozes. For the nth time, he blusters about closing down Guantanamo—and the nation snoozes. He opens the border even wider to welcome in more illegal aliens and future constituents—and the nation snoozes. Lame duckestry means not even being able to wake up your opponents.

There is so far no Obama legacy, except the creation of Donald Trump, a $20 trillion debt and zero interest rates—and the gift of flat energy prices that came despite not because of Obama’s efforts. Almost every major bureaucracy is awash in scandal or charges of incompetence. The common theme of the disasters at the GSA, EPA, ICE, IRS, NASA, Secret Service, and VA is ideological subversion and ingrained hostility to meritocracy. Would anyone be surprised that another government official pled the 5th, created fake email personas, resigned at 5 PM on a Friday afternoon, declared a foremost mission Muslim outreach, or withheld subpoenaed documents?