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LIZ SHELD:
“…On Monday, Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler held a hearing with three rabid anti-Trump characters and constitutional scholar, John Malcolm, from Heritage. The main attraction was disgraced, convicted felon John Dean, who was there to say that Trump is just like Nixon and the RUSSIA collusion conspiracy theory is just like Watergate. Everything is just like Watergate to Dean, who made similar claims under the Bush/Cheney administration and against Reagan. Watergate is Dean’s schtick, he’s a one-trick pony. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
At issue is whether the president can exercise his constitutional powers illegally. Since the #resistance activists fancy themselves experts at identifying and prosecuting thought crimes, they are arguing that Trump’s intent was to cover up a crime he didn’t commit and that he wanted the investigation to end to hide his non-existent crime rather than because his political opponents were using it to interfere with his ability to govern. We live in a universe where Hillary Clinton engaged in actual criminal behavior but didn’t intend to so and was given a pass, while Trump did not engage in the accused crime but “intended” to cover up his non-crime so he needs to be removed from office and thrown in jail. No one ever accused these folks of being logical.
One exchange in the hearing worth highlighting is when Rep. Jim Jordan got Dean to admit that he advised Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s lawyer, to withhold Cohen’s testimony from the GOP. Sounds kind of obstruction-y.
Remember, the point of these hearings is to put on a show, have selected segments air on television and disseminated on the internet, hope the public turns to support impeachment and then go forward with impeachment. Sadly for Fat Jerry, the NYC helicopter crash directed media coverage away from the Judiciary’s freak show so he didn’t get the intended media coverage…”
Thomas Lifson:
“…Lack of respect for juries can be very, very costly. The landmark jury verdict awarding $11 million (with the possibility of triple damages to come) to members of the Gibson Family, owners of a 5-generation bakery boycotted and slandered by students with the encouragement of a College official, is looking to be as much about social class as it is about the excesses social justice warriors (SJWs). I write this, not to castigate the local folk who made up the jury and sympathized with the “townies” attacked by the “gowns” of Oberlin, but rather in recognition of what William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who owns this story, pointed out about Oberlin’s response to the verdict. It appears that Oberlin, a relatively wealthy and elite college, is so arrogant – full of hubris as Clarice Feldman pointed out yesterday – that it forgot (or never knew?) The First Law of Holes: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”…
…The entire higher education industry is on the edge of an apocalypse. Prices have been jacked up to unsustainable levels, in large part to fund an unproductive bureaucracy, much of it devoted to “diversity,” just as a demographic decline in the age cohort eligible for college is upon them. The broader public observes the excesses on campuses from Berkeley to Oberlin, and realizes the contempt with which denizens of the ivory tower regards them. I have a hard time believing that the alumni of Oberlin College are going to open their wallets to finance the costs of this fiasco, nor do I foresee state legislatures or the federal government expanding their aid to higher education in the face of its excesses and contempt…”
Background that I have been following, but have not posted.
Catering to the PC mob is going to cost Oberlin College big bucks
Hard to tell, isn’t it?
RALPH VARTABEDIAN:
“…Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, farmers have similar stories. The state can take land with a so-called order of possession by the Superior Court while it haggles over the price.
But farmers often face out-of-pocket costs for lost production, road replacement, repositioning of irrigation systems and other expenses, which the state agrees to pay before the final settlement.
Those payments and even some payments for land have stretched out to three years. State officials have offered endless excuses for not paying, the farmers say…
…Mark Wasser, an eminent domain attorney in Sacramento who has represented more than 70 farmers and other businesses losing land to the rail project. ‘I would draw an analogy to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.’…”
Hat Tip: He didn’t win the Texas senate race. He lost to Ted Cruz. The race was not that close.
I & I Editorial Board, John Merline:
“…Lake Erie and Lake Superior — two of the five that make up the Great Lakes — broke records for water levels this May. Lakes Michigan and Huron could follow suit.
Naturally, climate change is getting the blame. “We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” says Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist.
But just a few years ago, climate scientists were insisting that a warming climate would cause water levels to decline.
In 2008, Science Daily reported on a study that attributed the decline in Great Lakes water levels to global warming. The researchers who conducted the study said that the drop “raised concern because the declines are consistent with many climate change predictions.”
In 2009, Columbia University’s Earth Institute informed us that “most climate models suggest that we may see declines in lake levels over the next 100 years; one suggests that we may see declines of up to 8.2 feet.”
In 2011, the Union of Concern Scientists said that “scientists expect water levels in the Great Lakes to drop in both summer and winter, with the greatest declines occurring in Lakes Huron and Michigan.”
In 2013, the Natural Resources Defense Council said that “it’s no secret that, partially due to climate change, the water levels in the Great Lakes are getting very low.”
That same year, Think Progress reported that “Several different climate models for the Great Lakes region all predict that lake levels will decline over the next century.”
Since the Great Lakes account for 21% of the world’s surface fresh water, these stories were all wrapped in doom-and-gloom scenarios about the impact on drinking water, shipping, recreation, and so on.
The very next year, however, water levels started rising.
So what are scientists saying now? Simple. They’re now claiming that the fall and rise of Great Lakes’ water levels are due to climate change.
“Climate change is driving rapid shifts between high and low water levels on the Great Lakes,” is the new “consensus.”
The truth, of course, is that water levels in the Great Lakes vary over time. And, as a matter of fact, they varied far more in the past than they do now. A U.S. Geological Survey notes that “prehistoric levels exceed modern-day fluctuations.”
It says that “Prehistoric variations in lake levels have exceeded by as much as a factor of 2 (that is, more than 3 meters) the 1.6-meter fluctuation that spanned the 1964 low level and the 1985-87 high level.”
And, as anyone who’s ever lived near the Great Lakes knows, the lakes themselves were formed in the wake a massive change in the earth’s climate — when the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age roughly 14,000 years ago.
So if the lakes’ huge fluctuations in the past weren’t caused by mankind’s burning fossil fuels, why are scientists so convinced that the far more minor changes happening today are?
The reason is simple. Climate scientists can blame anything they want on global warming. The climate models are imprecise enough that no matter what is happening they can point to it as proof that man-made climate change is happening. Too much rain, too little rain, bitterly cold winters, mild winters, more snow, less snow, rising water levels, falling water levels — they can attribute “climate change” as a cause of it all.
But if nothing can disprove a theory, and every event, no matter how contradictory, is proof that the theory is valid, is that really science? Sounds more like a religion to us…”
Rick Mills:
“…It’s a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world, at the Mountain Pass Mine in California.
Little happened at Mountain Pass during the 1950s except for the odd bit of research by the defense and scientific communities, but that all changed in the 1960s with the color TV. The discovery of europium, which emits a brilliant red light when bombarded with electrons, ushered in the age of technicolor, and Mountain Pass, which had abundant europium, flourished. Rare earths mined there were also used in medical scanners, lasers, fluorescent lights and microchips.
In 1980, a mis-classification of rare earths had catastrophic consequences for US rare earth mining. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Regulatory Agency placed rare earth mining under the same regulations as mining thorium – a radioactive element that drops out when processing heavy rare earth minerals like monazite. As we have written, the nuclear industry and its future would look a whole lot different if thorium rather than uranium was pursued as the main nuclear fuel. But that’s a different story.
New, onerous regulations on thorium made the mining and refining of thorium-bearing rare earth elements risky. Over the next two decades, the US rare earth mining industry collapsed. Defense One notes that, even though American mining companies extract enough rare earth ore, through mining other metals, to meet 85% of global demand, it is discarded because the regulations make it uneconomic to mine. How’s that for irony…”
