,hl=en,siteUrl='http://0ldfox.blogspot.com/',authuser=0,security_token="v_SeT2Tv8vVdKRCcG9CCW-ZdIfQ:1429878696275"/> Old Fox KM Journal : December 2015

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Americans Hate Politics

This little essay introduces some interesting ideas.


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Beale
Some might find it deeply ironic that I advance this theory on a website dedicated to political discussion. But I submit that the Ricochetti are the exception to the rule; the rule being that the vast majority of Americans despise politics, and when forced to pay attention to them, will punish those they hold responsible. I offer for my theory these arguments and evidence:
  1.  Our political system was built that way. Our political system is, of course, a representative democracy. The founders designed it to be one. They understood that for a direct democracy to work (i.e., government by plebiscite), a polity that was both virtuous and engaged would be required. Seeing a dearth of evidence for these qualities, they established a representative system to put a buffer between the passions of the mob and the day-to-day business of governing. Keep in mind that most of the founding generations came to these shores to be left alone by the ruling power.
  2. The electorate punishes those who get them involved. Before his unfortunate fall from Grace, Bill Cosby made an insightful observation: When parents have to intervene in an argument between their children, they tend to impose hasty, irrational solutions because they’re not interested in justice — just quiet. This is exactly how most of the American electorate behaves. Let’s face it, present company excepted, most people in this country are far too wrapped up in the exploits of the Kardashians, Honey Boo Boo, Real Housewives, or more gainful pursuits to pay attention to politics. In their minds, they hired a set of contractors to run the government; they expect them to get the job done, submit the bill, and then go away until they need something else. When the contractors we hire act like the guy in Seinfeld — the one who kept asking trivial questions about Jerry’s kitchen remodelling preferences — we punish them at the ballot box.
  3. The party in power usually gets blamed (but not always): This pattern has been part of our political history from the beginning. When things get bad enough that political stories dominate the news and intrude into our daily lives, we usually take it out on the party we think has been running the place. Case in point: You should have seen my wife’s reaction when her favorite show was pre-empted by Obama’s national address. That’s why it’s so rare to have the same party retain the presidency after a two terms. If you force people to pay attention, you willbe punished. Because Republicans were blamed (rightly or wrongly) for government shutdowns in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, they’re terrified that it will happen again. Hence the pre-emptive surrender by Boehner, McConnell, and now Ryan.
  4. Trump is a manifestation of this phenomenon: A disclaimer for any Trump supporters in Ricochet: Because you care enough about politics to subscribe to this website, by definition my theory does not apply to you. I assume that you have other reasons to support him. However, I believe that the great majority of Trumpkins are virtually apolitical and have little or no interest in civics or the Constitution. That’s why they’re willing to accept proposals that are, on the face of it, unconstitutional or at least inconsistent with American political traditions. They want to hire a competent “contractor” who will make America great again and leave them alone in the process.
Other facts that might support my argument are record-low levels of voter participation, and the domination of voters who seem to be the low-information variety.
There are certainly disengaged citizenries around the world (for a variety of reasons too numerous to discuss). But I submit that the American people are unique among Western democracies in their hatred of politics.

Friday, December 25, 2015

Merry merry Christmas, potheads.

As pot-growing expands, electricity demands tax U.S. grids

Jennifer Oldham - Bloomberg - Thursday, December 24, 2015

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[Quote] Pot’s not green.

The $3.5 billion U.S. cannabis market is emerging as one of the nation’s most power-hungry industries, with the 24-hour demands of thousands of indoor growing sites taxing aging electricity grids and unraveling hard-earned gains in energy conservation.

Without design standards or efficient equipment, the facilities in the 23 states where marijuana is legal are responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions almost equal to those of every car, home and business in New Hampshire. While reams of regulations cover everything from tracking individual plants to package labeling to advertising, they lack requirements to reduce energy waste.

Some operations have blown out transformers, resulting in fires. Others rely on pollution-belching diesel generators to avoid hooking into the grid. And demand could intensify in 2017 if advocates succeed in legalizing the drug for recreational use in several states, including California and Nevada. State regulators are grappling with how to address the growth, said Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner Pam Witmer.

“We are at the edge of this,” Witmer said. “We are looking all across the country for examples and best practices.”

The corporatization of what was once off-the-grid narco- agriculture is taxing electrical systems even as the nation prepares to comply with the Paris climate accord and the Environmental Protection Agency tries to reduce greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants, which is considered the single largest domestic source of emissions that create global warming.

“Consumers seeking a green lifestyle are likely unaware that their cannabis use could cancel out their otherwise low- carbon footprint,” Evan Mills, a senior scientist for California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wrote in an e-mail.

Indoor growing operations in 2012 racked up at least $6 billion a year in energy costs, compared with $1 billion for pharmaceutical companies, Mills found in a seminal study he did independent of the research institution. Some larger facilities today suck down as much as $1 million in power a month.

ArcView, an Oakland, California, research firm, estimates the retail and wholesale marijuana market will reach $4.4 billion in 2016.

Cultivation operations from California beach cities to Denver’s warehouse district to District of Columbia closets are waiting months for new infrastructure to bring them power. Planners predict the escalating consumption could in some regions undo Americans’ attempts to save energy by buying more efficient refrigerators, washers and hair dryers.

With the industry just coming out of the shadows, utilities are without data to forecast its electrical needs.  “We don’t have aggregated energy audits from hundreds of grow operations that show us an energy footprint,” said John Morris, director of policy and regulatory affairs at CLEAResult, an Austin, Texas-based consultancy that works with growers and utilities. “We have utilities in the North ... [blah, blah, blah unquote]

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.   What is going on here?  They are kvetching that pot growers are using too much power.  This is agriculture.  These are farmers.   Are there serious people complaining that farmers are using too much energy?   Farmers produce oxygen from their crops and greenhouse gases from their livestock.    Looks to me like the government, federal, state, and local and the power companies, which are mostly owned by the local taxing authority are reaping an incredible windfall in new tax and energy production revenue.  Poor babies.

"Without design standards or efficient equipment....   While reams of regulations cover everything from tracking individual plants to package labeling to advertising, they lack requirements to reduce energy waste...."    

Did Microsoft have "design standards" and "reams of regulations... when they went into business?   Did Apple?   Did Blackberry; did Johnnie Walker Red; did the Long Island RR or Ralph Cramden's employer the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines; did Alex Bell, Tommy Edison, George Westinghouse, Larry Edelson, Mikey Bloomberg, Alexie Kalishnikoff, John Browning, Paramount movie theaters, Dumont Television, Fred Friendly of CBS, Random House publishing company, Correction Corporation of America, the Lingerie Football League...    What a crock of hack reporting this piece is.  Incredible.   Who MAKES design standards?   The first entrepreneurs who invent or develop an industry create the design standards, NOT the government.   Sam Colt, John Browning and others developed the standards for ammunition and sold those standards to the government.

Who wrote those so-called "reams of regulations" that "lack requirements" on energy waste?   Reams means paper, which comes from tree wood, which is destroyed forms of life by the ton to generate the medium for the wasteful, inefficient, and energy consuming government to act out its perverse need to control the citizens.   Come on.  What a nutty point of view.


Some growers "rely on pollution-belching diesel generators to avoid hooking into the grid."   This way slanted observation seems to ignore the fact that we have over 26.4 million pollution-belching diesel" engines on trucks excluding publicly owned busses, garbage trucks, 18-wheelers, ships, tanks, passenger cars, construction sites, farm implements, and hospital and emergency agency backup power supplies. 
  • $33.1 billion paid by commercial trucks in federal and state highway-user taxes in 2009"
http://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industry_Data.aspx

Friday, December 18, 2015

British angle...

Frederick Forsyth: Court martial that shames the courts

SOME of you may have seen in yesterday’s Daily Express the reports of the extraordinary turnout in Birmingham as the new defence for imprisoned Marine sergeant Alex Blackman was handed in to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

...
Flight of an Aussie songbird
Ever since she emerged from the cast of Neighbours those many moons ago, tiny Kylie Minogue has been singing and dancing for our entertainment and hardly a day not on the pages of one newspaper or another. (What a publicity agent!) Now at the age of 47 she tells us she wants to have a baby – by her 27-year-old boyfriend.
Any gynaecologist would be able to offer a shrewd word of advice. Better not wait too long.
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Ooh matron!
Every winter the CO insists I have a kind of MOT, a medical check-up from follicles to toenails.
Nowadays that involves a check of the prostate. So while it was going on last week I remarked that I had spent four years at a public school successfully trying to avoid that sort of thing and now I had to pay for it. It took that doctor several minutes to recover.
I do so like a quack with a sense of humour.
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Much outrage has been expressed at the suggestion by the weird Donald Trump that all Muslims should be banned from entering the USA. His explanation is that some might be dangerous and kill Americans by bomb or gun.
He should check his facts. Apart from the single date we all now know as 9/11, all the Americans killed by Muslim fanatics inside territorial USA in half a century, if put together, are hugely outnumbered by those slaughtered on a single day in 1995.
There were 168 killed that day, with 650 injured, including almost 50 crippled for life. I refer to the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The bomb planter was a white racist supremacist called Timothy McVeigh. Perhaps The Donald should ban himself.
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Poor old Justin Welby, our present Archbishop of Canterbury. He tells us that when he heard of the Paris massacres three weeks ago he came close to questioning his belief in God.
Just as well he wasn’t present at Auschwitz. He could have repudiated 10 deities before breakfast.
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Daily Express link


I posted this comment to an article with several items by the famous author Frederick Forsyth in the British Daily Express newspaper.

OldFoxLess than a minute ago
1.) The prostate item reminds me of a cartoon from a few months ago. One guy asks his buddy, "What does 'Get ready for Hillary' mean?' 

The friend says, "That means get ready for a prostate exam that will last eight years!" 

2.) Most people do not realize the obvious about Donald Trump. The guy is from Queens NY, like "Goodfellas", and over the same era. He got richer and richer by building skyscrapers and luxury buildings. You cannot build buildings in NYC without buying concrete and cement (mob); without contracting with construction trades unions (mobsters); without bribing building inspectors; without hiring Teamsters; without hiring garbage haulers which are 100% mob, without letting the mob throw bodies into the concrete forms used to make the foundations of your buildings; without bribing zoning officials, the local police precinct "pad;" without paying "protection" money to the appropriate consigliere in the neighborhood; without giving no-work jobs and no-show jobs to the cosa nostra negotiators. Tony Soprano is an accurate rendition of how it works, as is "On the Waterfront." 

Trump casts aspersions on Ted Cruz from Texas (a genius appellate advocate) for being supportive of the oil industry, but what industry is Trump in? He's a gambling casino operator, for crying out loud! That's Vice. Alcohol, strippers, hooker hospitality and crooked odds on gambling games, vigorish, loan-sharkism, thuggery. His business is vice!  Exploiting addiction.  How do you staff, manage, operate, and expand the gambling casino business in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere? You bring in experts and experienced consultants from the industry, which are all run by mobsters, gangsters, and organized crime families. You get referrals to candidate employees from Vito, Antony, Paulie, Dominick, Alfonse, Bugsy, and Meyer Lansky. Come on. 

I'm not saying that Donald Trump has personally "whacked" anyone, or even arranged for it, but, after all, he is more connected than Frank Sinatra!


Sunday, December 13, 2015

Bill Moyers!




Moyers Vile Nonsense


Florida secretary of state in 2000 was an elected official, not an employee of the governor.



Robert Riger shared a link.
10 hrs
A botched voter purge prevented thousands from voting — and empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics.
BILLMOYERS.COM
Comments
Old Fox Thank you for posting this, Bob. I would never have seen it if you didn't. I disrespect Bill Moyers to the max for being SO Left and being LBJs apologist during war years. But since I worked on these cases at Greenberg, I need to study this.

They mention John Roberts anf Ted Cruz as working on the cases but we never knew that. The matter opened for me when our Tallahassee partner, Barry Richards, a Democrat who voted for Gore, called me about 7:30 PM and told me to get a copy of any Complaints filed in Palm Beach state or federal. A half hour later, Cesar Alvarez sent an email announcing the representation with an emphasis that it was purely a business decision.

All our litigation, election boards, etc. was led by and coordinated by Barry right up thru the Florida Supreme's ruling. We were told that former Secretary Baker had flown into Tally and hired us.

At that time, the Florida Secretary of State was an elected office independently of the Governor, so the somewhat snarky part about Jeb claiming to have nothing to do with Katherine Harris's handling or administration of the matter seems unfair to me.

It was remarkable and amazing to me that I observed very liberal deepNY Jewish Democrats working zealously with very Cuban Republicans for the client. One very prominent partner, who I won't name here, effectively disappeared from work and could not be enlisted for the case.

Anyway, after the Florida S.Ct. ordered a recount and we were focusing on the US S.Ct., one lawyer proposed a brief that the Florida Court had modified or changed the election law of the state, and--under the Voting Rights Act of 1964 or 5--no state with a history of racial predgudice could effectively alter their voting laws untit the change was approved by the AG. That would Janet Reno. He said the Fl.S.Ct ruling was ineffective and nonsense until the USAG signed off on it. That never happened.

That argument was not part of the Ted Olsen Petition to the high court, but an interesting point. Ted Olsen's wife, you know, was killed in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon a few months later.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Who Was First?


"Death to America and Israel"; "Zionism is Terrorism and Therefore Must End"; and "Death to zionism" apparently don't violate Facebook's community standards.
This isn't the first time critics have questioned Facebook's judgment.
WASHINGTONEXAMINER.COM


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Dane Opliger zionism is anti semitic. A Jewish state before their savior allows is anti semitic. Zionists are goddess, tbh. they steal, cheat, murder, lie, etc.
Percy Keats There are a tiny handful of REALLY freaky and bizarre Ultra-Orthodox who think such eccentric, disturbed things.
Dane Opliger The fact is that the occupation of Israel is on the country of Palestine, illigally. The state of Israel has zero accountability for their actions.

There is a large amount of jews who are against the state of Israel and Israels actions.
Richard L. Wright Should have studied harder at Kansas, and you wouldn't be so dense.
Dane Opliger Says the man with a rhetorical response. Why is Israel just in stealing land? the burdon of proof is on you Richard L. Wright
Cindi Brown All of those who commented above are totally anti semite. It is so sad to to see Americans with this attitude! Israel is our greatest ally. Do we really want as a majority the muslims?
LikeReply13 hrs
Dane Opliger Cindi Brown It is anti human to blindly support the occupation "state" of "Israel."

Crimes against humanity should be treated equally among all nations....See More
LikeReply12 hrsEdited
Dane Opliger Cindi Brown What about a Muslim majority? what are you trying to say?
LikeReply12 hrs

Dane Oplinger: there has NEVER been a country of Palestine. At best, it was a province of the Roman Empire with no indigenous rulers. When the Jews failed to recognize the Savior that G-d had sent to them, who was the once-and-for-all sacrifice that did away with animal sacrifice in the Temple, they LOST the Temple under Roman destruction in 70 AD. Thus, Saul of Tarsus was anointed and empowered as Paul to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles.

The Jews who rejected Christ were required after 70 AD to accept rabbinic teaching that prayer was an acceptable substitute for animal sacrifice. The Jews who accepted Christ, the disciples, the First Century Christians, and what are today called Messianic Jews, truly ARE justified in returning to Israel because they have seen by sight or by faith their Messiah come.

So, no Palestinian state. The area and ethnicity of Palestinians were totally subservient and captive to the governance and harsh rule of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic state that gave no self-governance to Palestinians or anyone else in their totalitarian empire. That nation's suicidal alliance with Germany in WWI eliminated the Ottoman Empire, with some help from Sir Lawrence and the unification of Saudi royalty, opened the door to British occupation and the dread Balfour Declaration. There was no Palestinian government, police, courts, or civic entity under British rule and then in 1947, when the Brits were ousted by Jewish armed forces, the governance became Israeli. The Palestinians "right" to that real estate is even less than the American Indians' "right" to Manhattan, Massachusetts, South Dakota, or the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street.

Blood sport

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I certainly hate the Roman Catholic church.  I hate that they tried to murder Queen Elizabeth, King James, Martin Luther, the Huguenots, the Reformers, so many of the heroes described in Fox's Book of Martyrs, Abe Lincoln, that they tortured and mudered so many under their Holy Inquisition, somehow found it Christian, if not Biblical, to execute so many thousands of honest Protestant Christians, Greek Orthodox, Jews, pagans, Animists, and Muslims...

But I have immense respect for certain individual members of the Catholic church.   Judge Napolitano, Judge ..., Judge Gene Spellman, McCarthy, and Justice Antonin Scalia are American heroes, intellectual giants, and defenders of our values, common sense, and precious freedoms.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/10/this-dumb-dishonest-attack-on-justice-scalia-takes-the-cake/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=b92446d055-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-b92446d055-83774053


Sunday, December 06, 2015

Nun.

A cab driver picks up a nun. She gets into the cab, and the cab driver won't stop staring at her.

She asks him why he is staring and he replies, "I have a question to ask you but I don't want to offend you."

She answers: "My dear son, you cannot offend me. When you're as old as I am and have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I'm sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive."

"Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me."

She responds, "Well, let's see what we can do about that, you have to be single and you must be a Catholic."

The cab driver is very excited and says, "Yes, I am single and I'm Catholic too!"

The nun says, "OK, pull into the next alley." He does and the nun fulfils his fantasy.

But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying. 

"My dear child." said the nun, "Why are you crying?"

"Forgive me sister, but I have sinned. I lied, I must confess, I'm married, and a I'm a Baptist."

The nun says, "That's OK, ...

I am on the way to a Halloween party, and my name is Kevin."