NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why the Pentagon Is Hounding CA Veterans for Money By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

A decade ago, the California National Guard offered thousands of soldiers large bonuses to reenlist and go to war. After investigations discovered fraud and mismanagement involving those payments, the Pentagon is demanding the money back, making veterans pay for the government’s mistakes.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers — many of whom served in multiple combat tours — have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses (of $15,000 or more), the Los Angeles Times reported. Worse, if the veterans refuse, the Pentagon uses interest charges, wage garnishments, and tax liens to recoup the money.

“I feel totally betrayed,” Susan Haley, a 26-year veteran and former Army master sergeant who deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, told the Los Angeles Times.

Haley comes from a family of heroes: her husband also served, and her eldest son lost a leg in Afghanistan while serving as a medic. Haley said she sends the Pentagon $650 every month, a quarter of her family’s income, just to pay the $20,500 in bonuses which was given to her improperly, in exchange for her six-year reenlistment. Haley said she fears her family may have to sell their house to repay the bonuses.

“They’ll get their money, but I want those years back,” she declared.

“It’s egregious that veterans who sacrificed their lives for this country are being asked to retroactively pay the price for sloppy government miscalculations,” Mark Lucas, executive director at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) and a 13-year veteran of the Iowa Army National Guard, told PJ Media. “The California Guard is showing no remorse as it yanks the rug out from under the very heroes it once asked to serve.”

Lucas said that he was not surprised at the bureaucratic mix-up, but that does not make it any better. “This is par for the course from a bureaucratic Pentagon that wastes billions of dollars each year on failed projects and mismanaged funds,” he said. “American veterans and taxpayers alike deserve better from the agency entrusted with over half of our national federal budget each year.”

The enlistment bonuses came at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Pentagon aimed to bulk up forces. Investigations from that time period determined that a lack of oversight allowed widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet their enlistment goals. In other words, the government told officials they needed to hire a certain number of soldiers, and they fudged the numbers in order to bribe more veterans to reenlist.

During that time, the Pentagon started offering the most generous incentives in history to retain soldiers. It also began paying the money up front, like signing bonuses in the private sector.

In 2010, a federal investigation found that thousands of bonuses and student loan payments were given to California Guard soldiers who did not qualify for them, or whose applications had paperwork errors, according to the Times.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The UN Commissars of Climate Change By Claudia Rosett

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

It is one of the stock hypocrisies of United Nations climate careerists, that while deploring carbon-emitting travel by everyone else, they have turned the UN into a prodigious generator of long, lavish and frequent “climate-change” conferences, held in enticing or exotic locales worldwide — in places such as Bali, Rio, Cancun and Paris.

From around the globe, participants board airliners (many of their tickets subsidized by your tax dollars) and carbon-emit their way to the next jamboree. From these grand climate shindigs, UN officials emerge to promise that if we’ll just trust them to allocate a couple of things of ever-expanding scope — for instance, the wealth of the developed world and the energy flows of the planet — they will aim over the next century or so to fine-tune the temperature of the earth to within a few decimal points of where it was on Al Gore’s 60th birthday…or something like that.

It’s the kind of performance that needs a skeptical eye, and full access by an independent press. It should be cause for great alarm when the conference authorities start walling out any reporters they suspect might dissent from UN climate doctrine.

Which is exactly what’s going on. Next month, from Nov. 7-18, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is planning a huge conference in Marrakesh, Morocco. The UNFCCC has approved press passes for some 3,000 journalists who wish to cover this event.

But it seems that dissenters from UN dogma need not apply. The UNFCCC has refused accreditation to a Canadian media outlet, The Rebel Media, home to The Ezra Levant Show (full disclosure: I have been an occasional guest on this show, discussing topics including the UN).

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Explosive coolant being put into cars to fight global warming By Ed Straker

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

A new kind of explosive coolant called HFO-1234yf is being put into cars to fight global warming.

HFO-1234yf is already becoming standard in many new cars sold in the European Union and the United States by all the major automakers, in large part because its developers, Honeywell and Chemours, have automakers over a barrel. Their refrigerant is one of the few options that automakers have to comply with new regulations and the Kigali agreement.

It has its detractors. The new refrigerant is at least 10 times as costly as the one it replaces.

Daimler began raising red flags in 2012. A video the company made public was stark. It showed a Mercedes-Benz hatchback catching fire under the hood after 1234yf refrigerant leaked during a company simulation.

Daimler eventually relented and went along with the rest of the industry, installing 1234yf in many of its new cars.

“None of the people in the car industry I know want to use it,” said Axel Friedrich, the former head of the transportation and noise division at the Umweltbundesamt, the German equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. He added that he opposed having another “product in the front of the car which is flammable.”

While cars, obviously, contain other flammable materials, he was specifically worried that at high temperatures 1234yf emitted hydrogen fluoride, which is dangerous if inhaled or touched.

The new coolant is superior to the HFC it is replacing in its impact on global warming.

Man made global warming is a myth, a fantasy; there has never even been a workable theory to even prove it (the current theory, that man-made carbon dioxide causes global warming, doesn’t work because most CO2 is produced naturally in the environment, not by industrial output). And yet our lives are risked, again and again, to protect us against this fantasy.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Have the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton’s eyes? By Brian C. Joondeph M.D.

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s health has become a campaign issue, not due to conspiracy theorists but based on troubling videos of her bizarre facial tics, difficulty ascending a set of stairs, lengthy coughing fits, and her collapse after the 9/11 anniversary commemoration in Manhattan. More recently, there is video showing Mrs. Clinton’s eyes not tracking together, crossing and misaligning.

As the focus of the campaign turns to Russian hacking, rigged elections, and sketchy polls, Mrs. Clinton’s health has moved off center stage. Yet it still a legitimate concern. Although she has not stumbled or had a public coughing fit, her nontracking eye movements continue to be apparent. Not to big media, which are far more interested in the latest Trump accuser, a porn star who just happens to be opening an online sex store. Yet her crossed eyes resurfaced most recently at a Cleveland campaign appearance a few days ago. The only thing missing is her campaign blaming the Russians.

What do these abnormal eye movements suggest about her neurologic health? In 2012 Mrs. Clinton fell, suffering a concussion and a brain hemorrhage requiring treatment with Coumadin, a potent blood thinning medication. More than simply a bump on her head, but instead “a terrible concussion that required six months of very serious work to get over” according to her husband Bill Clinton.

More specifically, she suffered a cerebral venous thrombosis, a large blood clot in her transverse venous sinus. These sinuses collect blood draining from the brain and can be injured via trauma or a variety of medical conditions which increase blood clotting tendencies.

As an aside, blood clots are not just a recent problem for Mrs. Clinton. She suffered a blood clot in 1998 when she was first lady, and only in her mid-50s. Typically blood clots at this age signify an underlying clotting disorder, likely a genetic defect in the clotting cascade. This might explain her subsequent problems a decade later. Her blood clot when she was first lady was only recently revealed, consistent with Mrs. Clinton’s penchant for secrecy and lack of transparency.

Late complications of cerebral venous thrombosis include speech impairment, difficulty with body movement, seizures, and altered vision, including double vision. Watching the many videos of Mrs. Clinton suggest that she has suffered all these complications.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Peter Smith: Fair-Weather Prattling

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

Western women need Trump. Feminists need Trump, as distasteful as this might seem to them. Christians need Trump. Jews need Trump. LGBTs need Trump. This is not the time to fret about Trump’s personal weaknesses. It is the time to rely on his strengths and his policies.
I switched on a BBC World News program and found myself listening to a round-table debate among three women and two men. There was only one white man. I know he was white because of his appearance and because, inevitably, he was referred to as such at one point to emphasise his innate bias. I recalled the BBC debates of my youth with people like Malcolm Muggeridge. They were all (‘biased’ and oldish) white men in those days. The standard of debate was far higher and the provincial accents not so evident or jarring. Or, is that my nostalgia showing? Or, is it yet one more symptom of a civilisation in its death throes? Both I would say.

Britain is allowing in some refugee children who have been encamped in Calais. The only trouble, as the white man said, is that some of them look as though they are 25 years old and all are male. I think it was agreed that the border-control people should lift their game without arriving at the obvious conclusion that corruption of one kind or another must be afoot.

A story was told of a lady with two young children who had agreed to foster a refugee child but, instead, had found a hulking young man on her doorstep. Reportedly, she is afraid for her safety and for her children’s safety. Ho-hum! I kid you not, at one point, we were told that it isn’t the fault of male refugees that they treat women badly; it is the fault of their culture. They know no better. No mention of Islam. Ho-hum!

All agreed, as you would expect from the BBC, that Britain had a responsibility to take in refugee children – though, to be fair, the white man did plaintively refer to homeless British children requiring support too. Nothing to see there; let’s move on — and they did, to Donald Trump. He was introduced into the conversation by one of the women as the “orange monster”. What followed was furious agreement that Mr Trump was unspeakable. But that wasn’t the end of it. Sexism is alive and well in the US apparently.

According to another of the women, the fact that Trump would win easily if only men voted and that Hillary Clinton would win easily if only women voted, showed that men were prejudiced against a woman candidate. The objection raised to this line of reasoning was that many women had found themselves voted into high office in the US and elsewhere with the support of men. But the more obvious retort that sexism can cut both ways was not made.

But there I go again forgetting that sexism, and racism too, only runs one way. Women couldn’t possibly be expected to vote for a lecherous man. On the other hand, Mrs Clinton’s persecution of women ill-used by her husband is forgivable. Because she is a woman?

As an older white man, I have a gender-related view of the voting landscape in the US. It is not the spurious and sexist one proffered on the program. Women for many years have been more wedded to the Democratic Party and less to the Republicans than have men. Men, relatively speaking, are more plugged into politics and therefore more likely to be swayed one way or the other by policies than are women, whose political preferences are more stable.

FOREIGN POLICY, POLITICS Comments turned off

Carol E. Lee :Battle of Mosul Has Bearing on Two Presidencies Outcome Could Affect Obama Legacy, Successor’s Challenge

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

WASHINGTON—The U.S.-backed fight to wrest Iraq’s second-largest city from Islamic State control holds implications extending beyond the battlefield and into both the departing and incoming U.S. presidential administrations, raising the stakes for how it unfolds in the closing weeks of the election campaign.

For President Barack Obama, Mosul is reverberating beyond his broader fight against Islamic State and into his legacy as a reluctant wartime president. It is an opportunity for Mr. Obama to secure a victory in a region that has given him few, but also a risky operation that has put his foreign policy under renewed scrutiny.

For Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, one of whom will inherit the Islamic State fight in January, the battle for Mosul has spotlighted their contrasting positions. Mrs. Clinton has said she would attempt to defeat Islamic State without resorting to the use of U.S. combat forces, while Mr. Trump points to Mosul as evidence of the failures of the administration in which Mrs. Clinton served.

The challenges and stakes of the battle were underscored last week by the death of a U.S. sailor, the first U.S. service member killed during the fight over Mosul. In a signal of the importance of the offensive both to the Obama administration and to the wider fight, Defense Secretary Ash Carter spent the weekend in Iraq, meeting with top officials and traveling outside Baghdad for meetings.

Speaking to reporters in Erbil on Sunday, Mr. Carter said taking back control of Mosul and Raqqa, Syria, were essential to eliminating the group’s territorial holdings, but wouldn’t spell the end of Islamic State.

“It is absolutely essential that we destroy ISIL in these cities of Mosul and Raqqa, however, even in Iraq and Syria, that doesn’t end the campaign,” Mr. Carter said, using another name for Islamic State. “We know that ISIL will take to other, lesser locations in the countryside in Iraq, to take the Iraq example, and we are all planning to help the Iraqi Security Forces to consolidate their control over all of Iraqi territory. “

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Obama’s reluctance to intervene in the conflict in Syria is more likely to define his legacy than the fight in Mosul.

“It would help if Iraq was to be made free of ISIS,” Mr. Haass said, using another acronym for the group, “even [though] making Iraq viable is a long-term and difficult proposition.”

But the battle in Mosul, paired with a future coordinated campaign in Raqqa, could hold strategic implications, said Ilan Goldenberg, director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank with ties to the Obama administration.

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hungarian Premier Again Opposes EU on Immigration On 60th anniversary of 1956 uprising, Viktor Orban says Hungary must fortify its borders By Margit Feher

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

BUDAPEST—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban criticized what he sees as a new oppressing force, the European Union, as he commemorated the 60th anniversary of the 1956 revolution against Soviet rule on Sunday.

Mr. Orban said Hungary must keep combating EU plans to welcome and assist refugees by fortifying its borders and regaining national control over migration policies.

“The task today of Europe’s liberty-loving nations is to save Brussels from becoming like the Soviets—that they want to decide instead of us who and how we want to co-exist with,” Mr. Orban said in a speech in front of parliament as he celebrated the spirit of the 1956 uprising, which was eventually crushed by Russian tanks. “We don’t want an alliance of free European nations to be replaced by a United States of Europe.”

Hungary is spearheading an informal coalition of former Soviet satellites, which joined the EU a little over a decade ago but has become increasingly vocal in calling for a looser union. The group, which includes Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, says it has grown tired of Brussels’ “diktats.”

“These two countries [Hungary and Poland], which are built on Christian foundations and independent within the EU, won’t by any means let our traditions and freedom be taken away from us,” Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said in a speech during the commemorations in Budapest.

Mr. Orban says the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming mainly from Muslim countries and who have crossed into the EU in recent months threaten Hungary’s Christian religious and cultural uniformity. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

By All Means, Take Mosul but . . . ISIS, like the matador’s red cape, distracts from the truly mortal danger—a nuclear Iran chanting ‘Death to America.’By Mark Helprin

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

By all means, take Mosul, and continue on until ISIS is no more.

But ISIS, also known as Islamic State, is and has been the wrong focus. Were it not holding hostage the scattered populations it controls in urban areas, a properly directed military coalition of two or three Western powers, or the United States alone, could roll it up in a week. Even as things are, and despite the chaos and cross-loyalties in the present theater of war, with competent diplomacy and military force ISIS could be crushed in a matter of months. The key is NATO’s activation under Article 5 in behalf of alliance member Turkey, which, if only technically, has nonetheless come sufficiently under attack to do so.

With air support from American and French carriers in the Mediterranean, the U.S. Air Force at Incirlik and Gulf bases, and the Turkish, Saudi, and Gulf States air forces, in very short order Turkish divisions from the north could link up with Saudi, Jordanian and an Egyptian expeditionary force from the south, stiffened by American, British, and other NATO units where needed, to cut Syria in half. With Kurds and Iraqis closing from the east, this would simultaneously surround ISIS and confine the Syrian regime in a truncated enclave shielded by its Russian patrons.

The primary purpose of such action, however, would not be to defeat ISIS. Though at the moment ISIS is undeniably the most publicity-rich and barbaric of the jihadist movements, in relation to its structure and resources its ambition to unify the Islamic world has—as in the case of bin Laden, Nasser, and the Mahdi of the Sudan—doomed it from the start. While much has been made of its links to other jihadists in Africa and elsewhere, these alliances have little practical effect, being little more than the distant salutes from one group of psychotics to another. That ISIS has survived for years is less a testament to it than an indictment of the quaking West.

POLITICS Comments turned off

John Podesta and the Russians When did Clinton’s top aide stop doing business with Moscow? By James Freeman

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has responded to the WikiLeaks publication of his private emails by suggesting they were stolen by the Russians to elect Donald Trump. What he doesn’t like to talk about is the business he’s done with a Kremlin-backed investment firm and the lengths he’s gone to avoid scrutiny of this relationship.

“Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer and the Trump campaign have been urging the media to pay attention to Mr. Podesta’s Russian connection and perhaps they should. The story begins in 2011 when the solar energy startup Joule Unlimited announced that Mr. Podesta had been elected to its board of directors. In a company press release, Joule’s CEO at the time lauded Mr. Podesta’s “extensive experience within the US government and internationally as well.” No one claimed Mr. Podesta was a scientific expert, but the company’s founder expressed the hope that their new associate “can help Joule build the lasting relationships needed for long-term success.”
A former White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, Mr. Podesta at the time was running the Center for American Progress, which supported the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.” Mr. Podesta personally lauded the effort to “build a more constructive relationship” with Russia at a 2009 event hosted by his think tank.

Mr. Podesta certainly seems to have made the effort to build a business relationship. About eight months after Mr. Podesta joined Joule in 2011, an investment fund backed by the Russian government, Rusnano, announced plans to invest about $35 million in the company. Several months later, Joule announced that Rusnano Chairman Anatoly Chubais was joining its board of directors. Around the same time, Mr. Podesta joined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

It’s not illegal to invest alongside a Kremlin-backed investment vehicle tasked with developing and acquiring valuable technology to benefit Russia. Nor, as far as we know, is it illegal to do so while simultaneously serving as an outside adviser to the U.S. secretary of state.

But Mr. Podesta may have been concerned about the attention this association might draw when he went back into government in early 2014 to serve as a counselor to President Obama. That’s when Mr. Podesta declared on his federal financial disclosure form that he had divested himself of his Joule holdings. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Myth of the Racist Cop Four studies out this year show that if police are biased, it’s in favor of blacks. By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on October 24th, 2016

FBI Director James Comey has again defied the official White House line on policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. The “narrative that policing is biased and violent and unfair” is resulting in “more dead young black men,” Mr. Comey warned in an Oct. 16 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. That narrative, he added, also “threatens the future of policing.”

Mr. Comey has spoken out before. In October 2015, after he observed that rising violent crime was likely the result of officers backing off proactive policing, President Obama obliquely accused the FBI director of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and “feed[ing] political agendas.”

But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed last year compared with the previous year, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males, according to a Guardian study. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of Sept. 16, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

Gangbanger John Felix prepared for his lethal attack on two Palm Springs officers on Oct. 8 by setting a trap and ambushing them as they stood outside his door. Two days earlier, parolee Trenton Trevon Lovell shot Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Owen in the face as he investigated a burglary call. Lovell then stood over Sgt. Owen and fired four additional rounds into his body. A planned assassination of two officers on coffee break in Vallejo, Calif., on Oct. 17 failed only when the assault rifle used in the attack jammed. In Indianapolis on Oct. 13, police headquarters were sprayed with bullets by a car that then fled, echoing a similar attack on Oct. 4 against the same police station.