“The time is now, now’s the time, now’s the time, now’s the time,” President Barack Obama banged away, while pressing for “comprehensive immigration reform,” in Las Vegas today.
Appeals to emotion and feelings have always dominated in Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary, if to go by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.
Today’s address in Nevada was no exception. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a logical argument in the Obama immigration address. For example: the president waxed about legalizing the “11 million undocumented immigrants [residing] in America,” while at the same time praising the contribution made by their kind to the founding of great “businesses like Google and Yahoo.”
The 11 million voting bloc being targeted (and their extended families and villagers, who’ll be joining them somehow under family reunification laws) originates mostly from Latin American.
By Wikipedia’s telling, they tend to be, “as a group,” “less educated than other sections of the U.S. population: 49 percent haven’t completed high school, compared with 9 percent of native-born Americans and 25 percent of legal immigrants.”
Sergey Brin of Google, known as The “Enlightenment Man,” happens to be a Russian who graduated from Stanford.
And what do you know? Yahoo’s Jerry Yang’s alma mater is Stanford University too. He is originally from Taipei, Taiwan.
If the founders of Google and Yahoo were as rigorous as Obama with their algorithms—they’d have come up short with their innovations.
Over 100 pages of redacted material: That’s what you get from the US government if you ask what guidelines its FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) agents follow in determining when to surveil American citizens using GPS (Global Positioning System).
The American Civil Liberties Union, reports RT, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in which it asked for specifics, for right now none of us knows what can trigger long-term surveillance without a warrant.
The written report omits the flare and cultural references the journalist, Gayane Chichakyan, makes. (What a novelty.)
“To the question of how, when and why the government can track its citizens, the FBI responded with this [holds up blackened pages]. It takes a lot of ink to print out something like this,” says Chichakyan, also one of my favorite reporters (because she’s super smart and goes after the story).
“Some artistic souls may think of the painting ‘Black Square’ by Malevich,’…” she adds. [“Think”? Now that’s optimistic.]
“The issue that needs to be raised [and won’t],” says Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about the New York locality, is, “we don’t have the modern energy infrastructure that we should have. We’re operating at the brink. Every day during hot days I’d worry about the possibility of a blackout. I built 10 new generators in NY City to try and address the problem. but had I tried to build a big generator, the environmentalists would have blocked it. We don’t build nuclear power-plants, we don’t expand transmission lines, we don’t put in modern generators. Anytime you try, it’s a 10-15 year process of litigation. We have to modernize our infrastructure, otherwise, we’re living on the brink. Something goes wrong and it’s 10, 5, 4 days to come back.”
“The opposition to [modernizing] projects, especially in the northeast, is systemic. You have to undergo 10-15 years of litigation to put in a new pipeline”
[SNIP]
Washington State is outside the orbits of power, so you hear nothing much about our annual battles with nature and regulation. But as “Dispatch from Third-World Washington State” detailed, early this year, we endure devastating power failures almost annually. The main problem in our state are regulations that prevent the maintenance of a tree-free grid and power lines.
Mayor GIULIANI repeated these important points on the Kudlow Report, implicating Obama’s policies of,
“absolutely just say[in] no to any form of expansion of energy, which is the reason why we’re having such a tough time recovering. … this aging infrastructure that we have. Well, we haven’t rebuilt it, not because we don’t have the money to do it, we haven’t rebuilt it because all these groups oppose every single thing you want to do. If you want to build a new generator, they oppose that. If you want to build new transmission lines, they oppose that. God forbid you should build a new nuclear power plant. Oh, my God, oh.”
KUDLOW: But that’s what Bloomy is saying. I don’t mean to cut. That’s what Bloomy is saying. When he goes down this road of global warming and he also mentioned, Rudy, cap and trade. He is saying we’re going to put limits on the volume of energy, all energy, including, you know, the new fracking energy for natural gas. This is an era of limits. It’s anti-growth. And New York City doesn’t need anti-growth policies and neither does the rest of the country.
Mayor GIULIANI: Well, the reason for the difficulty in recovering right now is that we are always at the breaking point on energy. … I knew this when I was the mayor. I built 10 new generators as a result of that. I really pushed to do it by the New York Power Authority. Where–and this is not just true of New York, it’s true of all throughout America. We operate at the limit. Now some of that is economics because it costs money to buy that excess energy, but some of it is also that excess energy doesn’t exist because we haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in 30 years. … We haven’t expanded transmission lines, we haven’t modernized. And a lot of that is because–I would call them not the environmentalists, the extreme environmentalists who oppose it and just block it completely. …”
It is no wonder that productivity and creativity are lost in the din over parasitical politics.
Today, the Microsoft Surface tablet went to market. To call this magical thing a “tablet” would be to undersell it. If it fails to win wide general appeal it’ll be because there is nothing quite like it, and because it is “a truly productive tablet.” Yes, The Surface provides the features that keep the average individual’s brainwaves from flatlining. But it does so much more. For example, “It runs as a full computer,” and sports a physical keyboard.
The no-nonsense Windows chief Steven Sinofsky is “almost unwilling to truly define the Surface as a tablet: ‘I’ve used a lot of tablets and this is not a tablet, but this is the best tablet I’ve ever used. And I’ve used a lot of laptops and notebooks, but this is not a laptop or notebook, but it’s the best laptop or notebook I’ve ever used.'”
Sinofsky has also ventured that The Surface “provides the best WiFi reception of any tablet today.”
