HALF-FULL REPORT 08/26/11

If you don’t read the TTP Forum, then you may not have heard the announcement of the Obama Administration’s that the US Geological Survey has identified the source of the earthquake that shook Washington DC last Tuesday (8/23).

The USGS is saying that it occurred on an obscure fault line that runs directly under the White House known as "Bush’s Fault."

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Speaking of Zero… the HFR Word of the Week is palilalia.  It’s a speech disorder, the involuntary or obsessive repetition of the same words or phrases – such as "millionaires and billionaires," "corporate jets," "redistribute the wealth," or "Bush’s fault."

Clearly, we have a palilaliatic president, who is incapable of saying anything creative or new, but endlessly repeats the same moronic liberalisms over and over.  What was Einstein’s term for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

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The most uplifting news of the week comes from Wisconsin.  On Monday (8/22), the Washington Examiner reported: Union Cash Cutoff Has National Implications.

You can now easily see how Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair law was so destructive to union power:  it makes union membership and dues-paying voluntary, not mandatory, and it requires annual union recertification.

This triple whammy is emptying union coffers – money they can’t spend on electing their puppets.  Thus the main teachers union, WEAC (Wisconsin Education Association Council with 98,000 members), has now fired 40% of its staff.  Other government workers unions are doing the same.

No wonder that George Will opines that government unions and Dems have suffered a Wisconsin Waterloo.

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In The Energy of Libya this week, we discussed the enormously positive economic and political potential of fracking, the technology of hydraulic fracturing that will enable the US to not just be energy independent but a major energy exporter to the world.

This morning’s edition (8/26) of Investors Business Daily has a fine quick summation of fracking and the scare tactics the enviro-loonies are waging against it.  There’s a great discussion going on in the Forum.  All of this should be required reading for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

We saw in the HFR two weeks ago (8/12) that Christie has become an apologist for Moslem sharia law.  Last week (8/19), he revealed himself to be a warmist idiot:  "Climate change is real… human activity plays a role in these changes."

Yesterday (8/25), he placed a one-year moratorium on fracking in New Jersey.  This guy is going downhill fast. 

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It’s a shame Christie isn’t informed enough to read To The Point.  Back in September 2005 – six years ago! – you learned in Solar Warming just how and why Warmism is a hoax.  That the cause of a warmer climate is – brace yourselves for it – the sun.  Not, however, the sun’s heat radiation but its magnetic activity.  This explains the correlation between sunspot activity and our climate:

"Sunspots are an indication of magnetic activity, magnetic storms on the sun. The stronger these storms, the more they deflect the shower of cosmic rays upon the earth from outer space.

Cosmic rays are streams of charged particles (mostly high energy protons) which create "condensation nuclei" when they pass through the water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere (the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere), condensing the water vapor into droplets.

It’s the same effect as seen in the scientific apparatus known as a "cloud chamber" invented by C.T.R. Wilson in 1900.

The more cosmic rays, the more high clouds in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere which reflect sunlight back into space, thus cooling the earth. The fewer cosmic rays, the fewer high altitude clouds, thus warming the earth."

This week (8/25), the prestigious science journal Nature reports that Cloud Formation May Be Linked To Cosmic Rays.  Sophisticated experiments at CERN, the high-energy physics lab in Geneva, are starting to discover what we explained six years ago. 

You’ll always be ahead of the game with TTP!

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In addition to fracking, The Energy of Libya was also about… Libya.  Bones, following Shunya and others on the Forum asks:

"Blood for sweet crude for Western Europe. Qatar gets the main gain. France and the UK secondary. Are these three countries paying the cost of our military effort to toss Gaddafi?  What…. is our gain from this pray tell!"

Here’s the answer from the guys at the DIA (Defense Intel at the Pentagon).  The gain, they say, is geopolitical: 

*PGL, post-Gaddafi Libya, will produce a lot more oil than before, and since its production costs are so low, it can sell at prices that undercuts and screws the bad guys in OPEC always demanding sky-high prices, like Venezuela and Iran.

*PGL oil with undercut pricing diminishes Saudi leverage to control the market.  Strengthening Qatar weakens the ability of their main rival, the Saudis, to push their weight around.   So we get to weaken Chavez’s Venezuela, the Ayatollahs’ Iran, and the Wahhabis’ Saudi Arabia.

*And there’s more:  we get to screw Putin’s Russia too.  Mass quantities of Libyan LNG will seriously diminish Russia’s ability to bully Europe via its Gazprom monopoly.  This is particularly important, for example, regarding France which has stupidly banned fracking in order to prevent it from competing with their nuclear energy industry.

Remember, Putin is KGB and runs a deeply hate-America thugocracy.  His main source of revenue and power comes from the sale of oil and especially natural gas.  Diminish those sales and you diminish his threat.

*Further, this has been a moral war, and one in which not a single American soldier or pilot lost his life.  The world is rid of a true monster, which is to be celebrated.  It is critically important for the world at large to perceive America as a force for moral good, and we have done that in Libya.

*Yet it is also important that the world see this not as primarily America acting alone, but in concert with its allies in NATO.  Liberating Libya is a NATO achievement which is a cold shower for our enemies, for they now see the West as a whole is more formidable than they thought.

That’s the skinny from the DIA.

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Should Craig Thomson be the HFR Hero of the Week?  Well, at least he should be in Oz.

The background:  Oz – Australia, pronounced oz-trial-yah – has the typically defective parliamentary system of government.  It’s like if we just had the House of Representatives, so the Speaker of the House would be president – Prime Minister for the Ozzies.

A year ago (8/21/10), Oz voters were idiotic enough to not vote their looney-left PM out of office, Julia Gillard.  She had promised to impose an economy-busting "carbon tax" on businesses as she’s a devout Warmist, then at the last moment she promised she wouldn’t.  The result was a one single vote majority for her party, Labor.

Once back in office, she promptly said she lied about her carbon tax – and the Ozzies remained so stubbornly stupid they haven’t been able to force a no-confidence vote resulting in new elections.  For all it takes is for one Labor MP to go overboard and Julia’s majority is gone.

On Tuesday (8/23), Labor MP Craig Thomson became Oz’s Anthony Weiner.  He was caught using his government credit card to pay for prostitutes when he was head of the Health Services Union, then caught in all kinds of cover-up attempts and lying about it.

He also used the card to take out $100,000 from the government union account to pay for his parliament election campaign.

To prevent him from being indicted – after which he’d have to quit and Julia’s government would fall – Julia ordered the Labor Party to pay all his legal fees.  And if you think our government is corrupt, try this (from the news report):

"Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione has refused to proceed with a criminal investigation into Mr Thomson, until he receives a complaint from the Health Services Union.

Mr Scipione’s decision means any criminal inquiry is subject to the whim of the head of the union, Michael Williamson, who is vice-president of NSW Labor and whose daughter, Alex, works as a staffer for Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Mr Williamson, as party vice-president, is one of those senior Labor party officers who signed off on paying Mr Thomson’s legal fees."

It’s a gloriously juicy scandal which will force the ridiculous one-seat Warmist Gillard government to go under.  Then Oz will have a second chance to elect a rational conservative, Tony Abbott, to lead it, which it should have had the brains to do a year ago.  Hope Ozzies will have learned their lesson.

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The real HFR Heroes of the Week are Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and her husband Avi Leitner.  They have a legal firm in Tel Aviv called Shurat HaDin (Hebrew for "strict law").  Their goal is to "bankrupt terrorism – one lawsuit at a time."

These are the folks who tied that moonbat "Freedom Flotilla II" up in knots filing so many creative lawsuits the boats never got out of Greek ports.  This is pro-Israel lawfare – and it’s inspiringly cool.

"There is a way of fighting back, we just have to start thinking like Jews again," says Avi Leitner.  Yes, and Americans have got to start thinking like Americans again.  We need pro-American lawfare to tie the ACLU, SEIU, ACORN, the Sierra Club, the EPA, the whole moonbat panoply into legal knots.

There is someone who seems to want to do just that.  In the story linked above, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner tells of meeting Rick Perry in Israel.  She was speaking at a conference he attended, and after her speech she relates that:  "he approached me and said, ‘I love what you do. It’s amazing what you do. If you ever need help combating Israel’s enemies, I’m here to assist’."

And he did, by writing a formal letter on his governor stationery to Attorney General Holder warning him that American flotilla participants could be violating the Neutrality Act.

In any regard, I’m bugging Jack Abramoff to launch a pro-American lawfare firm parallel to Shurat HaDin.  We’ll all get to bug him about it when he speaks at the Washington Rendezvous XI.

And here is a seriously exciting Rendezvous update:  Robert Agostinelli will be speaking at Rendezvous XI.  You’ve been reading his articles such as The Obtuse Oracle of Omaha and We Have But One Path Forward.  Here’s his Wikipedia bio.

As the co-founder of a $20+ billion private equity fund that is generating a current 60% profit for its clients, and whom the London Times lists as having a personal net worth in excess of $1 billion, Robert is in a position to provide us with uniquely valuable insights and advice on what the economic future holds. 

It is worth attending Rendezvous XI just to hear him alone.  Plus you’ll find him to be a truly great patriot, a proud American, and a very funny guy who’ll keep you in stitches.  He may be a billionaire, but he’s one of us.  There’s a picture of him and me at the bottom of A Reagan Fourth of July.

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One more enticement to join us for Rendezvous XI.

Miko has done yeoman’s work and finally completed recording the entire Platinum Rendezvous in Las Vegas last May 6-8.  It is twelve hours of video on six DVD’s.  It is available now, to TTP members only, for $75 (plus shipping).

However, any TTPer attending Rendezvous XI will receive the entire 12-hour 6-DVD set for $25 (plus shipping).
 – and you don’t have to wait until October, you can get it now.
(email: [email protected] or call 703-992-4529)

So come on, no more procrastinating.  You know you won’t be able to stand it if you’re not with your fellow TTPers at Rendezvous XI.  Better call us at 703-992-4529 to get on board.  See you there….