By Nathan Barton

Good morning, and enjoy the heat!  Did you know that the recent cold spell is all the fault of man made global warming?  The “polar vortex” is due to instability in the Arctic, which is caused by – that’s right – global warming.  I mentioned in the last column that PopSci claims that the Antarctic ice is melting and will cause the sea level to rise by 10 feet – not inches, feet.  But while people in Europe panic over melting glaciers in the Alps, a few historians have pointed out that in classical Roman times (First Century AD), there WERE no glaciers in the Alps.  Of course, the true believers in global warming believe that WE are as stupid as their minions are.  But we can easily figure out who is lying, can’t we?  On to news:

Really, really?  I hope so, maybe tomorrow!  Popular Science, which is kind of a fantasy magazine in the best of times, tells us that the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (a glacier) is underway, that sea levels will rise ten feet, and the process is irreversible and cannot be stopped.  Oh, dear, but only if you are one of a growing population of stupid people willing to live at less than 100 feet above sea level (I exaggerate, but seriously, that thick soupy air, not just dense due to lower elevations but also with all that extra (and unneeded) water vapor in it (to say nothing of all the volatile organic compounds present from rotting fish and vegetation common to sea level around the world) is BAD for you).  Let them flood: DC, NYC, Miami, Houston, New Orleans: we are all better off without them.  Really.  Truly.  Just too bad that San Francisco is so hilly and that more of LA is NOT that low.  Sadly, the PopSci article is stupidly political and filled with imaginary assumptions and just plain errors.  Too bad.

Stupid government employees on steroids: A reporter who works for Orlando’s Channel 9 lives in D.C. He was flying out of Orlando’s airport, and when he showed his D.C. drivers license to a TSA agent, the agent said that it wasn’t a valid form of ID. Then, the agent asked for the reporter’s passport. The reporter Justin Gray told the agent he didn’t have his passport and asked why he needed it when he’s got a valid drivers license. In his conversation with the agent, Gray found that the agent had no idea that D.C., that is, the District of Columbia, is actually in the U.S.  Now, even for TSA thugs that seems a wee bit stupid, but at least this television station seems to have good documentation.  Every business and agency can end up with people so stupid that you wonder why they haven’t eaten something poisonous and killed themselves already, but this is an extreme limit.  Of course, the reporter may have to start traveling between DC and Orlando by private car: TSA is gonna be looking out for him!

Stupid politician, stupid city government:  Please note that as near as I can tell, the City and County of San Francisco have actually NOT filed this petition with the US FDA, just that this pervert is trying to get them to do so.  Weiner wants San Francisco to let homosexuals donate blood, and told KTVU in San Francisco that the city has to make a statement to the FDA that times and technology are changing. He charged, “It’s discriminatory, it has no basis in public health. All donated blood is heavily tested, and it’s depriving our country of a lot of blood that could be donated to help save peoples’ lives.”  The man is both an idiot and an ideologue.  According to the CDC: Although MSM [males who have sex with other males: homosexual and bisexual] represent about 4% of the male population in the United States [Apparently this was before the CDC reduced that to just 3% based on better data], in 2010, MSM accounted for 78% of new HIV infections among males and 63% of all new infections. MSM accounted for 52% of all people living with HIV infection in 2009, the most recent year these data are available.

Mama’s Note: The percentage of homosexuals in the population, or how many have HIV infection, is irrelevant to the donation of blood. No, really. The blood is tested ad nausea, but using donated blood is – and always will be – risky, for a lot of other reasons. The real answer is artificial “blood” and cloned human blood, both of which are very possible, just extremely expensive now. The shortage of donated blood has, however, spurred many improved surgical and blood loss prevention technologies, and will continue to do so.

Yesterday, many “conservative” and “libertarian” websites and webzines had horror headlines about the Fuehrer banning AK47s.  Fortunately, JPFO (and a few others) tried to point out that the fearmongering is just that.  The sanction on Russian businesses that extended to Kalashnikov Concern and other manufacturers of popular weapons is NOT a direct ban on either ownership OR purchase of AK47s, variants, and other popular weapons – or even unpopular ones.  The link above came from JPFO and I expect more from those fine folks.  Liberty Zone TRIES to be careful, like JPFO, about telling the truth and not getting carried away over suppositions and extrapolations. But I suspect that very few people and sites will bother to report the truth. This is too juicy to refuse to gossip about.  People, even lovers of liberty, can be very stupid.

“Germany may go old school to guard against spying.” While they will continue to use encrypted e-mails and phones, they may also expand its use of typewriters, said Patrick Sensburg (head of the Bundestag’s investigation into U.S. spying. The Germans are even considering using electric or manual (non-electronic) typewriters.

Mama’s Note: Say, I’ve got a nifty idea… why doesn’t the German government quit lying, cheating, stealing and all that stuff they’re trying to hide?  Could start a trend…

Nathan: But if they stopped doing all that stuff, the US would double down on the spying, absolutely CERTAIN that they were hiding really nasty stuff…  Further thoughts:  the work to design, build, and install a tiny little chip with radio capacity (or using power lines to get outside a secure area) really isn’t that much, either for an old style electric (anyone remember the Selectric or other brands) or even a manual typewriter (based on the different sounds of the different keys striking, including upper and lower case).  There could be some data loss due to variations in the machinery, but probably not too much, given modern AI ability to auto-correct spelling errors.  BUT there is also the old-fashioned way – buy or enlist the aid of an internal spy willing to sell out his or her country for ideology or wealth, or blackmail.