Social Justice

The protest during the playing of the national anthem violates a tradition at sporting events for as long as anyone can remember. It started, as everyone knows, with Colin Kaepernick. That did not sit well with many fans, and when he failed to get hired by any NFL football team, other players started to sit in solidarity with poor Colin. Once President Trump weighed in on the issue, it really caught on and whole teams were kneeling.

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Fans, believing that players were disrespecting the flag and the many military men and women who had died defending our freedoms, really got pissed. People started boycotting the games and burning their team gear. Viewership of televised games started falling off dramatically. The Sporting News reported that their surveys showed that fully 1/3 of adults said they were less likely to watch a game because of the protests. A JD Power poll showed that 26% stopped watching because of protests and 24% because of the players off-field behavior. (Note: The USA Today and their “NFL player arrests database” shows there have been 870 arrests of NFL players for everything from DUI and drug possession to assault, domestic violence and murder in the last 17 years.) The ratings for games that had been slipping in recent years are now deteriorating at even more alarming pace.

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The NFL is a huge business. TV broadcasters pay $4.6 billion annually to televise the games and they wouldn’t pay that unless they were making a fat profit from advertisers. The value of the average NFL team has grown to $2.4 billion and the average salary for players is $2.1 million with some of the star players getting $20 million or more.

I’ve always believed that it is not a good business strategy to piss off your customers. The fellows that own these teams did not get rich by being stupid so some of teams said “enough” and insisted players stand.  The TV networks started not televising the national anthem at the start of the games. That, I think, is a spineless approach but is nonetheless consistent with the way the major networks handle many news items. (If we don’t show it or talk about it, it didn’t happen.)

The players contend that their protests are not about disrespecting the flag and anthem but they are demanding “social justice”. I did not know what social justice is or how we would know when it had been achieved so that players could once again stand for the anthem. I found a number of definitions on the internet, most pretty vague. Two of them sounded intelligible. “Justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunity and privileges within society.” OK, that sounds like socialism to me. The government and its bureaucrats decide what is fair and hands out equal slices of the pie to everyone. I wonder how the best players in the NFL would feel if everyone on their team got the same salary?

This second explanation from the Business Dictionary was: “The fair and proper administration of laws conforming to natural law that all persons irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions or race are treated equally without prejudice.” That definition defies an effort to either understand what is wanted or how to measure improvement.

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I believe that this whole thing is just an offshoot of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, a largely political anti-police organization. All the hysteria over the shooting of blacks by the police has had some negative impact of the lives of the innocents who live in the inner cities. Called “The Ferguson Effect” it intimated police into less aggressive policing and the result of that is an increase in black on black murders. Chicago saw a 32% increase in homicides in 2016 and is on track to top 700 murders again in 2017. The reality according to the NY Post is that police are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by black males than the other way around.

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The reality is that the inner cities where a lot of these players grew up are disaster zones of crime, dependency and drugs. 64% of the residents are on Federal assistance and 72% of all black births are to unmarried women. The inner city schools are a mess where according to a 2009 NYT piece the 50 largest cities have graduation rates of 53%.  Cleveland won the worst prize at 38%. Further studies in 2015 showed little to no improvement. Most of these fatherless young men grow up in hopelessness.

Except for those that win the genetics lottery and have exceptional athletic gifts. Those lucky few can parley those gifts into a free ride at a university where they are pampered, and if extremely fortunate, get drafted into the NFL. Even those that do not make it to the NFL have the opportunity to get a university education and escape the ghetto.

Some others may win the actual lottery and find places in charter schools like Harlem Success Academy. Those children have an improved chance of moving on to college or junior college and making their escape. For the rest…a short life is expected.

So how did the US cities become such a mess? I believe it all started with Lynden Johnson’s “Great Society” which is defined as “a set of programs designed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice”. So how did that work out after 53 years? Not great it seems. It did, however, work out just fine for Democrats. By turning many blacks into a dependent class they insured their loyalty at the ballot box. Blacks vote for the Democrat candidate about 90% of the time.

All major US cities have been controlled by Democrats for decades. Detroit last had a Republican mayor in 1957. For the arithmetic impaired that’s 60 years! Democrats have controlled in Chicago since 1927; St. Louis since 1949; and Philadelphia since 1952. Coupled with graft, cronyism and expensive deals with the public sector unions most of these cities accumulated massive debt. White flight from the cities and the migration of industry to non-union and low tax southern states caused jobs became scarce. Johnson’s dream exploded like an overfilled balloon.

If you ever get lost and accidentally drive through one of these inner city ghettos, you will see what an enormous task it would be to fix it. I have very little optimism it can be done. First, a lot of people like it just the way it is; the public sector unions, especially the teachers’ unions and the politicians. That means they will continue to elect the very same kind of people who created the mess. So waiting for the arrival of Social Justice will be like waiting for Godot.

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The Swamp

“When you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s difficult to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.”
Author unknown

Donald Trump came to Washington to “drain the swamp”. He’s finding it extraordinarily difficult to get it done. It turns out that the denizens of the swamp are fighting desperately to prevent it. And why not? It is one sweet deal for the swamp dwellers.

The four counties surrounding the White House are the wealthiest in the nation, surpassing LA and NYC. According to the NYT (5/12/17) there are 34 billionaires within a 25 mile radius of downtown and 2,049 residents worth more than 30 million, 45% of the workers earn more than $100,000 per year.

So who are these people and what do they do? According to Atlantic Monthly (12/18/13) they are lawyers, defense contractors, doctors and computer geeks. Mostly, they are lobbyists. In 2017 there are 34,700 registered lobbyists in Washington and among them 4,000 tax lobbyists.  They represent everything from large multi-national corporations to non-profits, unions and every manner of special interest groups.

Money is the lubricant that keeps the Washington machine running and there is lots of it devoted to lobbying. In the last decade corporations spent $14.4 billion and $2.4 billion on tax lobbying. The revolving door of government…. Retiring from government office and turning to lobbying your former colleagues can prove to be a very cushy retirement program indeed. Former Senators Breaux and Trent Lott put together a little lobbying team and netted $39.6 million in fees since 2008. The Podesta Group pulled in $32.3 million and former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein a piddling $29.2 million.

Congress is the other major group that does not want their comfortable swamp existence disturbed. There are 53 members who have held office for more than 40 years. Democrats have the distinction of having the top 17 with the longest time in Congress and despite having an approval rating with the public that is consistently around 10%, most get re-elected at an unbelievable rate. In the Senate it’s generally 90% and the House in the high 90s with 98% not uncommon.

So why would these guys fight to stay in office for what seems like relatively modest pay ($174,000 per year)? Simple. It’s the other stuff.

First, they get 239 days off. (Yeah, I know. They are back in their districts serving their constituents or maybe servicing their interns.) They have a generous allowance to manage their office and pay their staff. House members all receive $944,671 per year for this while Senators have an average of about $3 million. It’s slightly less or more depending on the population of the state.

Of course, there are other perks such as free gym, free deluxe parking at Reagan International (annual cost to taxpayers $740,000), many free flights and subsidies of 72% for health care under ObamaCare. Ever wonder why they are not too enthusiastic about repeal?

Retirement program is pretty nice too. Members need at least five years of service and must be at least 62 years old to receive a pension or 50 years old with 20 years of service. Depending on the number of years it can be up to 80% of their base salary.

The biggie though in my opinion is the weakened insider trading rules for members of congress and their staffs. For years members could trade in stocks with inside knowledge. How do you think all these guys become millionaires? For example, a CEO is having lunch with a member of congress ostensibly discussing a certain tax break that would benefit his company. He “accidentally” lets it slip that he is going to announce the takeover of a rival company meaning the stock price of that company is going to go up. The Congressman quietly buys shares of the target company and bingo, quick profit. Same deal and even more lucrative in the case of initial public offerings.

In 2012, an election year, Peter Schweizer, who had authored a book called “Throw Them All Out” went on 60 Minutes and exposed this scam. An embarrassed Congress publicly passed the STOCK Act to prohibit this practice. After the election they secretly and very quietly pulled the teeth of the restrictions and it was back to business as usual.

I guess if you’re a member of congress that’s been around for 40 years and some bombastic businessman comes in a says he’s gonna drain the swamp you would probably just say “why?” If they had wanted it drained they’d have done it already. Of course the Democrats are not going to vote for anything proposed by Trump. They have been on an unbelievable losing streak for a long time now and with the same leadership cannot imagine doing anything differently. Also, they still cannot believe Hillary lost but bitterness is not a policy prescription.

Many Republicans are no different. They like things just fine the way they are and resent Trump’s boorish, arrogant style. He said some nasty things to several of the Senators during the presidential primary so there’s a bit of payback going on. In addition, if Trump’s agenda gets passed and is successful he might be re-elected and a few of these fellows still lust after the Presidency and they don’t want to wait seven more years for a go.

Trump has had no legislative successes. The GOP attempts to repeal and replace ObamaCare failed and the tax cut proposals will likely suffer the same fate. GOP defections are the problem. The only accomplishment was the confirmation of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The Democrats did not fight hard on that one because he was replacing a conservative. The next one will be a battle royal. All other successes for the new Trump administration have been by Executive Orders. He approved the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines; permitted fracking; allowed energy development on public lands and ended the war on coal by repealing the Obama Clean Power Plan.

In addition, Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Global Climate Change Green Fund and the Climate Investment Funds, all expensive sops for the global warming crowd. Trump’s EPA also voided the Waters of the US rule, an Obama-era power grab that essentially put every ditch and wet spot in the US under federal jurisdiction. Good riddance.

Government jobs outnumber manufacturing jobs. 9,890,000 people work for the government. So far in 2017 13,000 federal jobs have been eliminated but 7,000 state and local jobs added. Trump’s businessmen oriented cabinet has also been chopping away at the deadwood in the big government bureaucracies. Trump wants to cut $54 billion out of the government agencies. According to a Scientific American article (3/16/17) the Trump budget proposes cutting funding to the EPA by 31%, the Energy Department by 5.6%, Interior by 12% and the State Department by 28%. Former Exon CEO Tillerson and now Secretary of State is finishing up a reorganization plan for State that will seriously downsize this bloated agency.

As everyone can understand, anyone facing the ax from their cushy job is unhappy about what Trump is trying to do. It is no wonder that the Administration leaks like a rotten wooden boat.

It will be fascinating to see whether Trump or the alligators win this one. I’m betting on the alligators.

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The Big Lie

Victor Davis Hanson appeared last night on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a classics professor at Cal State, an author, historian, columnist and scholar. In other words, a pretty smart dude.

He made a very persuasive argument about something I have believed for some time. Namely that this whole thing about “the Russians interfered with the 2016 elections” is a big lie. As we know, often a big lie is believed quicker than a small one. He called it a “slow motion coup” orchestrated by the progressives in the media, Hollywood, the climate change true believers, and the Democrats. The hatred of Trump for his defeat of their heroine, Hillary Clinton, drives them nuts. Does anyone really believe that the “spontaneous” marches and protests are not organized and funded by the Progressives?

So what’s the purpose of this campaign? I think it has three main goals (other than the pure hatred of the man himself): First, they want to derail the Trump agenda. He campaigned on the promise to replace Obama Care, cut taxes, stop illegal immigration, rebuild the military and reverse the Obama climate change policies. He also promised that he was going to “drain the swamp”. That scared the crap out hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats who did not want to lose their cushy deal. I suspect that explains all the leaks which may or may not be simply made up and planted with the media. The Democrats lost the House and Senate during the Obama years and they hope by delaying Trump and the GOP’s agenda they can run out the clock until the 2018 Congressional elections. They hope that by damaging Trump they win back the House and the Senate.

The second objective of this campaign is to scare the crap out of Republican congressmen where Trump won narrowly. The Democrats hope that the fear will cause these GOP congressmen to be squishy about supporting the Trump policies. Nothing is more important to the men and women in Congress as getting re-elected. Why not? They’ve got a Hell of a deal! Members of the House make a base salary of $174,000 per year but that’s just the beginning. They work on average three days per week, often leaving for home on Thursday and returning on Tuesday. They explain that they are working with the people in their own districts the rest of the time. Yeah, right. They get free parking at the Reagan International airport and free travel, mostly first class. They get the whole month of August for vacation and a week or two at major holidays. They do not have to sign up for Obama Care but have their own plan paid for by the government. If they serve at least 5 years or reach the age of 62 they can collect a generous pension plan in addition to Social Security.

OK, they have a well-paid cushy job. So, how do these guys all retire as millionaires? Well, they get cut in on stock deals from constituents to curry favor. Generous contributors to their elections offer perks, and likely some of that campaign cash slides into their pockets.

The third reason for this Russian uproar is deflect attention away from Hillary’s clearly illegal handling of classified documents and the corruption of the Clinton Foundation. Simple idea…. blame it on the Russians and Trump’s supposed collusion with them to defeat Hillary. On the face of that, it’s absurd. As I pointed out in a recent blog piece, “Excuses, Excuses,” the idea that Russia preferred Trump doesn’t make sense. Trump has promised to put back the missile defense systems in Europe that Obama took out, an idea that Putin hates, strengthen the military and take a more muscular stance on foreign policy. None of that could possibly please the Kremlin. Nobody is talking about how Hillary’s illegal server could have been hacked by anyone. The Russians are coming to steal our democracy!

Has everyone forgotten the “reset button” or Hillary’s role in selling 20% of the US uranium reserves to a Russian company in the Uranium One deal? The Clinton Foundation received $145 million from Russian uranium investors after Clinton’s State Department approved the deal. Frank Guistra, the founder or Uranium One gave $30 million. And let’s not forget shortly after the deal was approved, Bill got a $500,000 gig to give a one hour speech to Russian businessmen. What could Bill have to say that was worth half a million bucks? The specifics on this are spelled out in a 3/28/17 article in World Net Daily. The media has absolutely no interest in talking about this.

Nobody’s interested in investigating that smelly deal or Hill’s illegal handling of classified documents. The hypocrisy is laughable and patently obvious. And speaking of hypocrisy, what about the Comey firing? A couple of months ago the Democrats were in lock step demanding the FBI Director be canned. They claimed that Comey’s behavior was the reason for Hillary’s defeat. Now when Trump actually does it, they are screeching like scalded cats. He fired him, they say, because Comey was getting too close to uncovering the link of Trump and Putin to influence the election.

Unfortunately, the campaign is working. A special prosecutor has been appointed meaning that this phony scandal will drag out past the 2018 elections. The Democrats will still be pushing this narrative even though this is a big nothing burger. It’s raw partisan politics aided and abetted by the Progressive left and may well stop the efforts to correct the many things wrong with the political mess in Washington.

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Excuses, Excuses

The Democrats and Obama are finding all kinds of excuses as to why Hillary lost the election. Rather than examine why the people voted against the policies of this popular President, they are looking to outside forces to explain it. Of course, an ancillary benefit to this campaign is to discredit the Trump presidency so that they can shout for the next four years that the Donald was not legitimately elected just like they did after the Bush/Gore election.

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The widely touted explanation is that the Russians interfered with the US election, presumably because they preferred Trump over Clinton. The theory goes that the Russians hacked Clinton’s and the DNC emails and turned them over to Wikileaks who in turn, dribbled them out in the closing weeks of the campaign thereby harming Hillary.

I don’t buy it. Trump doesn’t either. In his news conference the other day he said,”Does anyone in this room actually believe Putin prefers me over Hillary?” That has been my question all along. Why would Putin favor the guy who is certainly tougher?

Image result for tillersonThe Democrats like this theory for a couple of reasons. First, this gives them another jab at Trump and his Sec of State nominee, Tillerson because they supposedly have ties to Putin. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it diverts attention away from someone who very likely did do it, and one that has a motive.

Then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (R) and kisses Suha Arafat, wife of Yasser ArafatThe left wing has always favored the Palestinians over Israel. Hillary was buddy-buddy with Arafat’s wife and Obama is about 46% Arab and, at the least, sympathetic to the Arabs. Obama and Netanyahu have never hit it off and Obama slighted him publicly on several occasions. But open warfare developed between the two when Obama was trying to get the nuclear deal with Iran.

Netanyahu thought the deal insured Iran would get nuclear weapons as a result of the deal and threaten the very existence of Israel. He was “invited” to address a joint session of Congress so he could plead for shit canning the deal. That infuriated Obama and he promised payback.

Image result for netanyahuThe opportunity came when Netanyahu ran for re-election in 2015. The Obama state department run by Clinton gave $350,000 to fund a left wing group called “One Voice” that had also been funded by international groups sympathetic to the Palestinians. The funds were used by One Voice to build campaign infrastructure, create data bases of potential voters and recruit and train activists all designed to defeat Netanyahu. This was exposed by a US Senate sub-committee on Investigations which also revealed that a letter was sent by the Israelis to Hillary complaining about the US meddling in their elections. The letter was never opened.

Obama also sent over his 2012 National Field Director, Jeremy Bird, to assist in the campaign. Bird’s strategy for Obama had been using data to target messaging to individual voting groups and a form of community organizing to get out the vote.

Netanyahu won despite the meddling of Obama. I would say that the Israeli leader might have been more than a little annoyed with Obama and Clinton.

The FBI has reported with 99% confidence that multiple foreign agencies hacked Clinton and the DNC’s emails…. at least five. Everyone knows the Israelis are very, very good at this sort of stuff and excellent at covering their tracks. Remember the Stuxnet virus that got planted in the Iranian nuclear centrifuges? It was widely believed that either Israel or the US did it. I’d bet on Israel. And, I bet they made it look like the Russians did it.

Both the Russians and Assange, the founder of Wikileaks deny that the Clinton and DNC emails came from the Russians. Assange joked that any fourteen year old could have hacked Podesta’s email. I don’t think the Obama administration believes the Russians did it either. Oh, the Russians likely were among the group who hacked into them but I think they suspect the Israelis gave it to Wikileaks. The Israelis actually have a motive. Obama meddled in their elections and so the Israelis paid him back.

All this sanctimonious prattle about a “foreign government interfering with our democratic institutions” is just frustrated journalist and politicians venting. Hell, the US has done it for years, most recently and openly in the Netanyahu contest. Obama got in the last punch though. He abstained in that UN vote to censure Israel over settlements, a landmine Trump will have a long job defusing.

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Climate and Fish

I can hear you saying, “Oh no, not another blog post on global warming!!” This is a piece about fish, something I know more than a little about. I majored in marine biology and ichthyology with courses in oceanography, marine ecology and nearly any science course you could imagine. Furthermore, I still study the fisheries issue.

So, you might conclude that when the “Province” newspaper came out with another junk science piece claiming this time that global warming is killing off fish stocks due to a warming ocean, I got a bit unglued.

Associate Professor William Cheung of the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries at UBC said his theory of preventing the collapse of fish stocks depended on everyone abiding by The Paris Agreement on climate change and thereby restrict the rise in air temperatures to 1.5 degrees C. Doing nothing, he said, would cause them to increase to 3 degrees C. Going to 3 degrees would warm the water and reduce fish catches by 40%, they concluded.

Let me ask you….. when you are going to heat up water for a cup of tea do you put the flame above the water or below? How long would it take to heat up the water with a temperature 3 degrees warmer than the room above the pan? I have no idea either but surely a long time. Associate Professor Cheung has a BS in biology and a masters degree in philosophy and apparently he’s going for his doctorate in that field. He works for the World Wildlife Fund. Doesn’t sound like he knows much about fisheries and the WWF is a notorious left wing, radical AGW outfit.

I grant you there are always, it seems, competing theories espoused by scientists in the area of climate science and we tend to believe the ones that reinforce our prejudices. In the case of warming oceans, I am inclined to believe the study sponsored by the Scripps Institute’s Argo program that has 3500 free drifting buoys all over the world. These buoys sample the temperature of the water every ten days and send it up to a satellite.  They have compared this accumulated data with that collected during the voyage of the HMS Challenger (1872-1876) and concluded that ocean temperatures have risen .33 degrees C since 1876. Most of that rise occurred during the first 50 years after 1876. It would seem that rising ocean temperatures are not a worrisome problem.

Ass. Professor Cheung’s contention that fish stocks have been declining because of rising water temperatures is merely an attempt to demonize Trump for threatening to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Man has been destroying fish stocks beginning in Roman times and over the course of our history. The list of species wiped out or nearly so is sobering. I won’t chronicle the entire butchers bill but will discuss a couple in detail. If this history of greed and stupidity interests you, pick up Callum Roberts book, “The Unnatural History of the Sea”.

The Romans developed a taste for the eggs and flesh of the mighty sturgeon and they spawn in rivers where they are relatively easy to catch. It was common to catch these monsters weighing 475 Kg and they had to be hauled out of the water with a team of oxen. Like many other species that have been driven to extinction or nearly so, when a species begins to be exploited, the larger fish are taken first and the average size of the fish caught falls. The collapse of the fishery begins when the size/age drops below the age where they become mature and can spawn. For example, the slow growing sturgeon does not spawn until they are 20 years old. This is precisely what happened to the Atlantic cod. More on that debacle later.

Russians developed a taste for caviar. Overfishing eventually led to a ban on the fishery in the Caspian Sea.

In Medieval Times, Europeans caught species that returned to the rivers to spawn such as salmon, whitefish, shad, eels and sturgeon using weirs, nets, spears, and hook and line.  At the time, forests were being cleared for crops and little attention paid to erosion. Soil washed into the rivers and streams destroying spawning grounds and smothering eggs. Dams also prevented migrating fish from reaching their spawning grounds. Populations plummeted. Atlantic salmon were prized and were soon nearly destroyed in the European countries.

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The Scandinavians discovered cod in the 11th century and found they could dry the huge fish that ran to 3 to 4 lbs. A trade in these dried cod flourished throughout Europe and soon became a target species for European fishermen. The results were predictable and soon their numbers and size shrank. The European fisherman using drift nets began pursuing other species and saw those numbers decline as well. The advent of trawlers, the dragging of heavy metal weighted nets over the bottom, soon finished the job on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Trawlers killed everything as they plowed the ocean floor, not only the fish they were seeking, but all manner of bottom life with the result that all species were swept up and the habitat was also destroyed.

The New World opened new fishing grounds. When the first white explorers came to North America they discovered an abundance in the sea that astounded them. Huge shoals of cod as long as your leg were so thick in number, you could not thrust a spear into the water without coming up with one. The rivers were choked with Atlantic salmon. Every manner of fish species and oysters clogged the shallow waters. Like the buffalo, passenger pigeon and the huge trees the early settlers could not imagine ever wiping them out.

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The steam trawler “Pelican”

Then the European and Russian trawlers showed up in their steam trawlers and with the advent of freezers proceeded to decimate the cod, halibut and haddock.  Then came the pollack, red fish and flounder. The scallop trawlers were even more destructive to the sea floor.

Extending the EEZ or “territorial limit” out to 200 nautical miles did help in keeping the foreign trawlers out but they were soon replaced by domestic trawlers that continued the over-fishing. The cod population collapsed. In a desperate attempt to save the cod fishery in 1992 the Canadian government put a two year ban of cod fishing and 40,000 people were out of work. That ban has been extended as the cod fishery struggles to recover.

The same sad story unfolded when men started settling in the Pacific Northwest. They found unimaginable riches in lumber, gold, furs and fish. The runs of salmon were massive and seemingly inexhaustible. All manner of fish in incredible numbers inhabited the sea. Salmon were especially important to the native tribes that inhabited this vast land.

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The various species of salmonids of the Oncorhynchus genus had been around since the Miocene period some 6 million years ago. They had survived the birth of mountains, glaciation and floods and seen cataclysmic climate change and continued to survive and thrive.

That is until the white man arrived and started killing them all and destroying their rivers. This history and the destruction is carefully documented in a book from a fisheries biologist from the University of Oregon, Jim Lichatowich called, “Salmon Without Rivers.” The usual suspects in habitat destruction were in play from logging, to mining to dam building. As the salmon runs started to decline, wrong-headed stocking programs were attempted and failed miserably. Of course, foreign fishing boats… factory ships…. continue to over-fish these amazingly resilient fish far at sea.

Warm water fish like groupers and sea bass have also been over-fished to dangerous levels. Sword fish and blue fin tuna are being fished to endangerment levels. The giant bluefin can weigh in at 400 kg and fetch as much as $100,000 at auction in Tokyo.  These fish are so valuable that they’re now using satellites to track these giant ocean wanderers. Soon these magnificent fish will be no more.

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So, what’s to be done about the elimination of one species after another? Eventually the problem takes care of itself. When all the fish are gone, it’s no longer practical to send fishing fleets thousands of miles. International agreements would help. It worked for whales. Perhaps limiting the killing of bluefin tuna could work, but I doubt you could change the taste of Japanese diners so the demand would remain. The Japanese have paid little attention to the ban on whale hunting.

One thing that might help is to ban trawling as a method of fishing. It not only kills everything in its path, but also destroys the habitat. Professor Roberts has sponsored the establishment of vast marine reserves where no fishing is allowed. This has shown great promise in allowing marine life to flourish and grow unmolested, and eventually repopulate surrounding seas.

Clearly, Cheung’s theory that a minor uptick in temperature, even if it happens, is not going to impact fish populations. And, his contention that warm water species are going to move to the Arctic is pure fantasy and disconnected from fish behavior. This is not science, it’s pure BS.

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Doubling Down on a Losing Hand

After the cry-ins dried up and the marches in the streets dwindled on the heels of very cold and unpleasant weather, the mourning began. Michelle Obama gave an interview to Oprah opined that while her hubby fostered hope, the US was now entering “a period of hopelessness.” Really? The stock market doesn’t reflect that.

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Meanwhile, Hillary emerged from her exile to meet with her major donors at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The Christmas party had been planned as a victory celebration. I think most donors showed up to see what the hell happened to the $1.2 billion they raised for her campaign.

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Hillary in her speech to the assembled fat cats offered them her excuse… the Russians did it because they did not like her. She further explained that they meant to undermine the integrity of the US election. But last week, Obama in his final press conference prior to jetting off to Hawaii, said that the Russians did not compromise the voting process or effect the outcome.

Most, except the true believers in the Democrat Party, are clever enough to understand that the emails released by Wikileaks simply exposed how sloppy they were about electronic security. (Her campaign manager, Podesta apparently gave out his email password in a phishing scheme!) The emails showed how snaky they are and the disdain they held for the lesser humans out there. This was, of course, certified by her public comments about the “basket of deplorables” that supported Trump.

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This blame-the-Russians thing came after the recount effort fizzled. Jill Stein, the Green Party entry in the Presidential sweepstakes decided the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania should be recounted to ‘insure the integrity of the election’. She had received 1% of the votes so that seemed too public spirited to believe. She had collected about $3.5 million for her whole campaign but immediately raised $7.3 million for the recount effort. Naturally, the Clinton supporters wanted the recount, hoping to turn enough votes to reverse the results.

Here’s how it went:  in Wisconsin, Trump gained 316 votes. He had led originally by over 22,000 votes so it begs the question, why would Stein, et al. spend $3.5 million on this futile exercise?

In Michigan, the recount was stopped by the courts because Stein had “no standing” since she got less than 1% of the vote. The Hillary folks did not step forward to admit this was really about her.

In Pennsylvania, a sampling of the largest counties in and around the big cities found Clinton gaining only a handful of votes. It was not enough to order a statewide recount in a state where Trump’s lead was 46,000 votes. With that faint hope demolished, the Democrats settled on the Russia-did-it meme. Supposedly leaked by the CIA who refused to talk to anyone about it, sparked the new cause of intimidating the 538 electors with tons of letters, emails and threatening phone calls to get them to switch their Electoral votes to Hillary. They called for a delay of the vote scheduled for Monday so the CIA could brief the electors on the Russian involvement in a meeting prior to the vote. The CIA wanted nothing to do with it. Dan Henninger of the WSJ in a brilliant piece yesterday called “Steal this election” dubbed this latest ploy the “goofball gambit”. Tough to top that.

Hunters who get lost in the woods generally walk in circles. Sometimes clockwise and sometimes the other way. When they come across a set of tracks in the snow they often follow them, not realizing that they are their own. Democrats frequently act like lost hunters. When things get sticky they go left resulting in crushing defeats in the next election.

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Henninger recounts the history of these leftward lurches in his piece. After the ’68 election that saw Nixon defeat Humphrey, they decided to go left with McGovern in ’72 who got 17 electoral votes. Ouch.

After the Nixon impeachment, the Democrats could have run Howdy Doody and won.  Come to think of it they did run Howdy Doody….. Jimmy Carter. His colossal mess brought in Reagan and in response to his success, the Dems once again reverted to the leftward tack and brought in Mondale in ’84. He got his ass handed to him with a total of 13 electoral votes.

After the Trump victory and the shellacking by the GOP in the House, Senate and Governorships, the Democrats are instinctively going leftward again. They elected Pelosi as Minority Leader. The new darlings of the party are Lizzy (Pocahontas) Warren and Bernie (Socialism is great) Saunders. They are thinking about appointing Keith Ellison as DNC chairman. Ellison, a muslim, has been linked to supporters of ISIS and is a clear opponent of Israel. What could possibly go wrong with this team?

 

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I think it was Napoleon who suggested: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

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The Everybody Gets a Trophy Generation

After the election of Donald Trump one opinion writer speculated that Trump’s election signaled the ‘end of political correctness’. Perhaps. But before that happens, the death throes will be protracted. This struggle will be led by the current generation of pampered, helicoptered, everybody-gets-a-trophy youth who have been sheltered from the real world and any smidgen of adversity.
Youthful Hillary Clinton supporters were seen on TV crying uncontrollably. Major universities had crying rooms complete with coloring books and Play-Doh to soothe students distraught over the election of Trump. My own alma mater, Cornell, had a “cry-in” where students could sit in a circle and cry together. When I was at Cornell, I would have had to cry in my dishwater where I washed pots for my food. One Yale professor made the midterm exam optional so that students depressed by the election results wouldn’t have to discommode themselves with one of the more troublesome aspects of university life.

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The more visible expression of their dismay were the marches and riots in many of the big cities across the US and the complete meltdown of the left-leaning media. Any marches always bring out the anarchists who use any pretext to break windows and start fires. Tearful youths made up many of the marchers, but naturally were joined by their helicopter left-wing parents convinced that America was doomed. Many were “triggered” and felt “unsafe” now that Trump would be president. Really? Unsafe? What did they really think was going to happen? Did they believe Trump was going to send the police to break into their dorm rooms and confiscate their pot stash?

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Reporters covering the protest marches started asking the young marchers if they had voted in the election. About half admitted they had not voted. Call me old-fashioned, but I figure if you did not bother to get off your butt and vote, you have no right to bitch about the outcome.

Speaking of triggered and unsafe…Thursday’s edition of “The National Post” featured an article by Christie Blatchford about a teacher at a posh BC private school who got fired for expressing an opinion on abortion. His class was a criminal law unit on “vice, ethics, morality and the law”. He was pointing out that in a pluralistic democracy there is often a difference between people’s personal morality and the law. Here is where he uttered the fateful opinion
that he personally disapproved of abortion but it was, in fact, the law. One of his female students was “triggered” by this comment and felt “unsafe”, refusing to return to class.

What the Hell is triggered anyway…stuffed like Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger? Physically assaulted by the horse? OK, that’s absurd. I will anxiously await some thoughtful reader explaining triggered to me.

The teacher found himself reprimanded by the school administrator and forced to make a humiliating public apology in front of students and fellow teachers. Ms. Blatchford likened this to Maoist China where public confessions for ideological sins were punished. The spoiled brat then rushed out of the room crying because she thought she was being singled out. That was it. They fired the guy.

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I wonder if the school administrators and the parents felt really good about firing the poor guy right before Christmas for a politically incorrect comment? What the parents of this spoiled child should have done was confiscate her cell phone and car keys and saved the $30,000 tuition and made her go to public school. And made her apologize to the teacher for the consequences of her behavior. As far as the administrators of this school…they should be publicly humiliated.

These kids, the Everybody-Gets-a-Trophy Generation, will be our future leaders. Most of these youngsters have never had any adversity in their lives. How are they going to survive the setbacks that inevitably happen at some point? Like when they get fired, or one of their kids comes down with a terrible disease, or the arrogant young woman comes home early to find her husband in bed with her best friend. Shit happens in life and if you can’t even deal with encountering someone with a different opinion or belief without freaking out, how are you going to deal with some really serious stuff?

Our forefathers survived the adversity of the fear and death of the Spanish flu epidemic, the horrors of WWI, the depression years and the massive deaths of WWII. In the 40’s and 50’s most people lived on farms where hard work and sacrifice were common, where helping your neighbor was expected and political correctness incomprehensible. It is not surprising that those of us who lived those years find the behavior of these pampered teens and college
students ridiculous.

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I have theorized that the survivors of SEAL training, regarded as the most difficult in the world, are usually the men who have had a history of adversity in their young lives. The training is the definition of adversity writ large. If you’re sensitive to verbal abuse, this is not the program for you. As the Instructors in BUDS like to say, “Second place is First Loser.”

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I Was Wrong

It certainly seemed like long odds to me and the so called experts who pontificated on this election. My belief had been based on the skewed electoral college map and the ingrained voting blocks and special interest voters. I wrote and I blogged she would win a couple of times. I was wrong. And I was not alone. The TV gurus on ABC, NBC and CBS looked like they had just received news that their house had burned down and the dog had died. Several looked like they were about to break out in tears. The newspapers and magazines had cover stories already written calling Trump a loser. Stop the presses!! It was the worst call since the Dewey vs Truman election. I should have listened to myself and my last blog piece about “experts”. Dan Gardner’s book “Future Babble” shows that so-called experts are right only 50% of the time, but in this election, the experts were right maybe 3% of the time.

I’d often said that the choice was between a buffoon and a crook. Calling him a buffoon was overstatement. You don’t build a business like his without both acumen and the ability to hire good people and let them do the job. As the campaign wore on, I heard some stories (unpublished in the main stream media) of Trump’s amazing generosity and smarts. These, of course, were overshadowed by his ability to say and tweet some over the top crap. He insulted and pissed off a number of Republicans in the primaries and many of the pure conservatives refused to support him.

The main stream media, both print and televised, are decidedly liberal and hated Trump and openly cheered for Hillary. The polls showed a decided lead for Hillary, and the experts refused to be daunted by the recent miserable failure of the polls in the UK on the Brexit issue. The media focused on the “horse race” aspect and refused to get out in the fly-over states and talk to real people. Instead they hunkered down in their liberal enclaves of New York and Washington DC and talked to each other.

None of it mattered. If you look at the US map of the election results by county, the country is nearly pure red with pockets of blue in the major cities. Of course, the numbers of Hillary voters in the cities gave her a slight lead in the popular vote (about 1%) but a loss in the electoral college…. just the way the Founders envisioned.

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The reaction, after the Democrats and liberals let what had happened sink in, was anger and frustration. They think they know best what the country needs and their prescription was four more years of the leftist policies of Obama. The problem is that Hillary is a flawed human being and corruption and controversy follows her around like a cloud of stink around a skunk. People go to jail for the security violations she and her staff committed with that email server. Also, the Clinton Foundation used Hillary’s position as Secretary of State to enrich herself, her husband and her cronies. That she and Bill were protected from prosecution by the Obama Justice Department fooled no one.

She’s been around for 30 years and everyone is sick to death of that snarky smirk.

What everyone underestimated is the middle class have been squeezed for years with stagnant wages, higher taxes and costs. They are sick to death of the over regulatory Federal Government. By huge margins they think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

The pundits claimed that the white, uneducated men swung the election, a clear demonstration of their smug elitism. Celebrities once again vowed to leave the country.

Canada seemed to be a popular destination. Some joked that Canada should build a wall and make the Americans pay for it. One immigration official pointed out that moving to Canada is not so simple. We’ll see how many actually move out.

I think this election result happened because of ‘a revolt against the machine’.

The ordinary Americans are fed up with the corruption, and over reach of the Federal Government. One wag said that this was a stealth return of the Tea Party that had been destroyed by the “weaponization of the IRS”. I believe it was also a statement about the ineffectiveness of the GOP in Congress who seemed more interested in getting reelected than in stopping the Obama machine.

The Black Lives Matter movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement joined with a bunch of college kids who are ignorant of history and civics, and urban liberals and are protesting in the streets right now. There’s not much they can do about it. Trump is the next President, like it or not.

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Experts

 

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am not a big believer in global warming, to say the least. Both the Vancouver newspapers with a decidedly leftward tilt, however, are all in on AGW.

I used to get upset with them about publishing articles that were clearly not done by climate scientists but came from some US-based advocacy group. They were cleverly disguised to look like a scientific study but you could never figure out any scientific group that had actually performed it.

So, I’d write them an email asking what peer-reviewed study this article came from. I said it was lazy reporting for their so-called journalists to simple publish some press release they received from a California anti-carbon group. They would never publish any of my letters to the editor pointing out the disinformation from the AGW crowd.

2015 was a drought year in the Pacific NW. The big sea of unusually warm water sitting out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called an El Nino condition caused an unusually hot and dry summer. The summer and early fall were marked by frequent and serious forest fires.

The flip side of the El Nino event is the La Nina condition with colder than normal masses of water in the central Pacific. This is part of a normal cycle called the ENSO or the El Nino Southern Oscillation and reverses every seven to twelve years. The NOAA website says “… the ENSO has large scale impacts on global weather and climate.”

The people who study this stuff were predicting last fall that the El Nino was falling apart and the La Nina was taking over. A La Nina year usually means a cooler and wetter year in the PNW. So, it baffled me why a purported “expert” on water resources would confidently predict another exceptionally dry year in which Vancouver would likely have to ration water and allocate more money to fight forest fires. The underlying assumption on his part was that global warming would cause drought and less rainfall. AGW does not cause droughts in the PNW but an El Nino year can and does frequently.

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One would hope that a “water expert” would know this fact. Apparently not. He confidently predicted that 2016 would be as dry and possibly worse, requiring rationing of water. “The Province” published his scare prediction on December 19 and ran a full-page headline stating, “Brace for Another Drought Crisis”. The teaser underneath stated, “Recent precipitation has replenished Metro Vancouver reservoirs but a water expert warns the worst is yet to come.”

I cut out the front page and the full-page article on the inside and set it aside. I said to myself, “Let see what actually happens.” I had just finished reading a book called “Future Babble” by Dan Gardner, a senior writer for the “Ottawa Citizen”. He had come to my attention a number of years ago when he wrote a 10 part series on drugs. Carefully researched and even-handedly written, I thought it was excellent. When I learned he had published a book, I had to read it.

Gardner carefully documented his study of “experts” and the success of their pontificated predictions on many subjects. He found that the experts were correct only about half the time and you could do just as well with a coin flip. He cites some highly public failures and how they shrug off their mistakes to make yet another sweeping prediction. Two examples among many in the book were Revi Batra who published a best selling book in 1985 called “The Great Depression of 1990.” Of course, that didn’t happen. Did he run off and hide from the press? Nope. He published numerous other books in subsequent years making pretty much the same predictions for future years and all did not happen.

Similarly, Paul Ehrlich who I have mentioned frequently, published “The Population Bomb” in 1968 predicting some 200 million people would die of starvation in the 1980’s. Obviously, did not happen, but did not deter him from continuing to predict and publish, appearing on talk shows and giving speeches. You gotta hand it to these guys, they have a lot of gall.

If Al Gore had been right, Florida would be underwater by now and the oceans would be 20 feet higher by the end of the century. But, the oceans are only rising less than 1/8th inch per year, the same pace since the end of the last ice age. He should miss it by 19 feet!

One expert in England predicted that children in school now would never have seen snow in their lifetimes. Nope. Wrong.

The La Nina took over in the central Pacific and it’s been a colder and wetter summer in the PNW as one would expect in a La Nina year. I checked with the various weather sites and BC has had a normal amount of moisture this year and September has been unusually wet this year. Subsequently, forest fires were minimal this summer.

Our water expert can join a long list of expert predictions that were totally wrong.

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Rest In Peace

Today we put our freezer to sleep. No it did not die. We put it to sleep
much like you would an ailing and aging pet. And, like a much loved pet, it
was a sad day for us for the freezer has faithfully kept ticking along without
complaint for 48 years.
After we got out of the Navy we moved to Chicago where I worked on the
60 story 1st National Bank building learning the methods of the high rise
construction business. Specifically, how to apply granite panels to the
outside of multi-story buildings.
After nine months and a cold and windy winter in Chicago we packed up
our baby daughter Tara, our English Setter Zeke and our worldly
possessions in our ’66 Barracuda and headed for the Pacific Northwest.
We moved in to our frst house, a wood frame rambler on a sandy bluff
overlooking Eld Inlet (AKA. Mud Bay) a tidal arm of Puget Sound. It was
about 20 miles outside of Olympia in an area of hobby farms and wooded
home sites.
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The place already had a stove and a fridge courtesy of the previous owner
so we had to buy furniture and our frst big appliance purchase— an
upright freezer. Considering cost, we chose a Sears Coldspot and placed it
in our tuck under garage.
It got plenty of use. Every year we’d make a trip or two out to Westport on
the Washington coast and go salmon fshing. A cooler full of salmon and
perhaps some ling cod would be carefully flleted, wrapped and stashed in
the freezer. Our neighbor down the road raised lambs and each year we’d
purchase one, cut it up and have lamb for a year. A quarter or half of beef
got stashed in there as well.
Just to fll up any holes in the space of the freezer duck and pheasant
hunting proved excellent in western Washington in those days and they
ate well. One fall I shot a blacktail buck in my neighbor’s apple orchard
and that really filled the Coldspot to over flowing.
Karen and Mike were born when we lived in that house and they all
learned to love seafood as we could catch trout in local creeks and sea run
cutthroat off the beach. Clam digging on our beach was easy and our
friendly neighbor had an oyster farm. I vividly remember the girls sitting
on the counter on either side of the sink while I popped oysters that they
quickly slurped up.
It was a great time, but shit happens and the recession of the early ’70 hit
western Washington particularly hard. Boeing laid off something like
65,000 people and the ripple effect through the economy raised the
unemployment rate to 25%. We went from 25 employees to just me and I
could not get a freplace job. I took a job with a granite company in
Minnesota and we had to move. It would be the first of 14 times we and
the poor freezer moved.
We and the Coldspot got hauled to Minnesota and some years later to
Wisconsin. We moved several times in Wisconsin as our circumstances
improved. Finally, we retired to Whistler, BC and after our skiing days
ended with various injuries and ailments, moved to Surrey, BC.
The Coldspot too was showing its age. It had some dents and the light no
longer worked but it still kept plugging away. It got flled with ducks and
moose a few times in recent years but it became clear that the door
gaskets were leaking. Finding parts for a 48 year old appliance is not
possible. Besides, we had two other freezers and sadly we decided that
it was time.
In this age of planned obsolescence our Sears Coldspot has been a
champion. As they say, they don’t make ’em like that anymore.
RIP

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