90 Miles From Tyranny : 2017-11-19

In order to drain the swamp, President Trump must first destroy the Green Blob.

This is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from a series of data leaks and Freedom of Information (FOI) revelations exposing the relationship between left wing campaigners and the great climate change scam.

Global warming, it becomes clear, is primarily a left-wing political issue, not a scientific one. Green is the new red.

These leaks show how rich liberal backers—left-wing institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, eco hedge-fund billionaires like Tom Steyer, and the various socialistic Geek Emperors of Silicon Valley—are funneling millions of dollars into sock-puppet environmental organizations both to undermine Trump’s economic agenda and to finance his political opponents both in the Democratic Party and the GOP.

U.S. Climate Alliance

This poses as “a bi-partisan coalition of states is committed to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.” Or so the website says. But anyone can set up a website.

The truth, as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has discovered through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-requested email correspondence, is that U.S. Climate Alliance is just a front. Its real purpose is to enable the richly funded green lobby to buy up Democrat governors—and one, token, squishy Republican governor: Gov. Charlie Baker (MA)—by effectively bribing them with free office, research and staffing facilities which they can run off books.

There is nothing actually illegal in any of this. But to appreciate how ethically dubious it is, just consider how the liberal media would respond if the roles were reversed and it were conservative politicians being provided with all these off-books services by, say, the fossil fuel industry.

Chris Horner, who initiated the FOIA for the CEI, put it like this in the Washington Times:


Mr. Horner asked how the media would react if, for example, the Koch brothers provide staffing on behalf of a Republican governor.
“This would unleash a tsunami of Pulitzers and hysteria if the political parties or priorities were changed,” said Mr. Horner. “Here is a real test for ‘good government’ activists—is this all right if the ‘right’ politicians and donors pushing the approved agenda outsource government?”

What the emails show is the intimate relationship between the liberal donors, green sock puppet organizations and Democrat politics.

Climate activist groups, most notably Climate Nexus—a sponsored project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors—act as the press arm for these governors’ offices at no charge. They also operate as a “shadow staff”to support climate change communications efforts, and supplied research later promoted by these state governors as their own. This includes at least one for-profit contractor, raising the question who its actual paying client is.

The three main Democrat governors fronting the U.S. Climate Alliance are Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Jerry Brown and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

But the people actually running it are green lobbyists and activists, doing the bidding of their wealthy anonymous donors in liberal strongholds like Silicon Valley, as well as the usual liberal suspects such as the Rockefeller and Hewlett Foundations. One prominent figure is...

George Soros Caught Hiding $18 Billion From IRS – “Biggest Tax Dodge Ever”

George Soros has come under fire for hiding $18 billion dollars from the IRS in what experts are calling “the biggest tax dodge in US history.”

Soros transferred $18 billion of his fortune to a private charity he controls in order to shelter it from the Internal Revenue Service.

Wsj.com reports: This may be the single biggest tax dodge in U.S. history, yet no one on the right or left seems to have raised an eyebrow.

True tax reform is predicated on the principle that all income should be taxed at a low rate once, and only once. But much of the wealth that Mr. Soros spent years moving into his Open Society Foundations will never be taxed. A gift of billions of dollars of appreciated stock escapes any capital gains tax, and the estate tax as well. So Mr. Soros can donate appreciated stock that Open Society Foundations can liquidate without the government ever taking a cut.

There’s more. When a person donates untaxed, appreciated assets to a private foundation, he may also deduct up to 20% of its market value on his personal return, carrying forward this deduction for five years. This double write-off may be the sweetest deal in the tax code.

The donors also can retain control of the money within the private foundation for years or even decades before it is disbursed. Since the foundation can employ family members at six-figure salaries for life to “administer” it, the umbilical cord to the donor never has to be cut.

Congress should stop ignoring this tax-avoidance scheme. The super rich have already poured hundreds of billions into private foundations, but the figure could soon be in the trillions. Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to give away 99% of his Facebook shares, currently estimated to be worth somewhere around $70 billion, and much of it will go to a foundation his family controls. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have each put roughly $30 billion tax-free into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This has left the foundation so flush that it spent $500 million on a 12-acre, 900,000-square-foot office complex in Seattle for...

Mom whose son is in China jail speaks out about President Trump in way that puts LaVar Ball to shame



When it comes to the parents of athletes who have found trouble abroad, consider Antoinette Brown to be the anti-LaVar Ball.

She has been on a 14-month long quest to have her son Wendell Brown released from a Chinese jail after an altercation at a bar. Brown says her son was attacked by a beer bottle, and the incident got him in trouble with the authorities.

Brown appeared on Fox & Friends to tell her story of trying to get her son out of Chinese jail.

“President Trump intervened when three UCLA basketball players were arrested for shoplifting,” Pete Hegseth began. “He helped them return home safely. The father of one of those players downplayed the president’s help.”

“It wasn’t like he was in the U.S. And said ‘okay, there are three kids in China. I need to go over there and get them,” Ball said in the clip. “Then, I would say ‘thank you’ if he would have put them on his plane and took him home. Then I would have said thank you, Mr. Trump, for taking my boy out of...

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #86


You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside? 
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific, 
from the beautiful to the repugnant, 
from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed, 
you could be inspired, you could be appalled. 

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. 
You have been warned.

Friday, November 24, 2017

Movie: GANDAHAR - LIGHT YEARS




English version[edit]

This version was directed by Harvey Weinstein and produced by Bob Weinstein through Miramax Films itself, while noted science-fiction author Isaac Asimov made the revision of the translation. The English title is a translation, not of the original title, but of the original tag line "Les Années lumière" (The Light Years) as seen on the French poster.[2]
  • The English version does not contain most of Gabriel Yared's soundtrack for the original version of the film. New music was produced for certain sequences in the English-language version of the film, these new pieces were created by the combined efforts of Jack Maeby, Bob Jewitt and Jim Klein.
  • A certain scene in the English version was edited due to sexuality – the scene where Airelle and Sylvain are in the nest. In the uncut version, Sylvain is shown removing his shirt, later, he and Airelle are shown lying nude in the nest at night, seemingly after having been intimate with one another.

10 Famous Historical Figures With Bizarre Secret Lives

We tend to think of history like a comic book: we have heroes, we have villains, the end. But that is not how real life works. People are too complex to be boiled down into one easily digestible image. However, that has not stopped history from conveniently forgetting a few things about some of its most famous figures. From the bizarre, to the disgusting, to the downright horrifying, prepare for a look at the secret lives of ten history class staples you thought you knew.

10Charles Dickens



Iconic English author Charles Dickens is probably the only Victorian figure most people can name. Aside from penning classics like A Tale of Two Citiesand Oliver Twist, Dickens was the mind behind everyone’s favorite holiday ghost story, A Christmas Carol. It seems obvious that the man who dreamed up Ebenezer Scrooge’s uplifting transformation would himself have been a pretty kind fellow.

But he was actually kind of an obnoxious creep. When not busy scribbling tales of generosity and love, Dickens was known to be fond of incredibly annoying “pranks.” He would speak in a language he had invented. He would run up to strangers on the street and screech bizarre nonsense riddles at them. And during one particularly insane trip to the beach, he grabbed a random young woman, dragged her down to the water, and threatened to kill her. He claimed he had fallen in love with her and that the two must drown together. So ironically, Dickens was the last guy you wanted over for Christmas dinner.

9Charles Lindberg


American aviator Charles Lindbergh made history with his famous 1927 non-stop flight across the Atlantic. This world-first rocketed Lindbergh to instant stardom and earned him the adoration of pretty much the entire planet. Maybe a little too much adoration, as it turns out.

Widespread affection and the ability to fly are apparently a recipe for temptation: Lindbergh had mistresses in far-flung locations the world over. When not with his wife Anne, he would spend time with his secretary, Valeska, or one of two sisters in Munich, Germany. These affairs lasted long enough for him to father children with all of them, and then kept right on going. Lindbergh kept a total of three families that knew nothing about the others. He would visit his illegitimate families a few times a year, stay for a few days, show them a good time, and then literally take off again. His children only ever knew him by a fake name.

8Alexander Graham Bell




Trump Keeping His Word on H-1B Work Visas


The pro-immigration lawyers are apoplectic, which is always a sign for celebration. As in other Trump achievements during his first year, the President is accomplishing a cutback on foreign tech workers displacing Americans entirely on his own. The Republican Congress remains stubbornly opposed to the immigration restrictions Republican voters want. 

The main tool at President Trump’s disposal is the appointment of a new agency head, in this case Francis Cissna as director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), who came on board in October, followed in swift order by the novel idea of actually following the law and scrutinizing visa applications.

Unsurprisingly, the law calls for high-skilled visas for foreign workers to fill critical jobs. Instead, Silicon Valley and the Obama Administration abused the privilege and used it to import cheap STEM workers to replace higher-paid Americans. H-1B visas are heavily used by outsourcing firms. First, they bring a worker here to be trained by skilled Americans. Then they shut down the American facility and outsource the jobs to India. Not a nice policy for the U.S. government to actively support.

Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guest workers on temporary visas.

(snip) Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
Controlling the abuse of H1-B visas is a core part of Trump’s agenda to bring jobs of American companies back home.
Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”
These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to...

The Trump Effect: China Slashes Import Tariffs on Consumer Goods In Boost For Trump And Western Exporters

China announced it is slashing import tariffs on 187 consumer products starting next month.

The Finance Ministry pointed to the cuts being concentrated in products in short supply domestically which, it believes, will prompt local producers to improve quality. The items in the list which, includes baby formula, diapers, electric toothbrushes, medicines, cosmetics, coffee machines and whisky, are part of the broader category of consumer goods which account for roughly 30% of total Chinese imports. Of all 187 tariff reductions, the biggest was on vermouth and similar alcohols, like Martini, which were cut from 65% to 14%. The strangest was the cutting tariffs on electronic toilet seats, where domestic production must be truly appalling from a quality perspective, or markedly insufficient.

Notwithstanding the Finance Ministry’s comments, it raises the question whether China is responding to loud and frequently repeated complaints from Donald Trump about the Middle Kingdom’s unfair trade practices. In 2016, the US trade deficit with China was $347 billion and is expected to rise to around $370 billion in the current year. In October 2017, the US accounted for 70% of China’s total trade surplus. More from...

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #85


You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside? 
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific, 
from the beautiful to the repugnant, 
from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed, 
you could be inspired, you could be appalled. 

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. 
You have been warned.

PROPERTY RIGHTS SAVED PILGRIMS FROM STARVATION


Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog hosted by the Washington Post, revisits the story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth and how instituting private property rights saved the community from ruin.

There is much to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. One lesson of the holiday that we should try not to forget is how the Pilgrims were saved from starvation and misery by private property rights. Economist Benjamin Powell summarizes the story here:

Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did.

In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on equality and need as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. The problem was that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.

Faced with potential starvation in the ...