By Nathan Barton

Good morning.  Is government just lying? (Again?) Or being hypocritical?  Or just being stupid?  Or all of the above?

Anger at president reaches new high as faith in government falls according to the WaPo. New polling data suggest that anger at the guy in 1600 PA and a growing distrust of big government could spell trouble for Democratic lawmakers heading into the 2014 midterm elections.  Of course, he is a lame duck, so all the Dems have to do (as the guy running for Senate here in South Dakota is doing) is distance themselves as much as possible from him.  Not that such an action is hard for politicians of any stripe.  They are just naturally hypocritical when it comes to running for office (or anything else).

In an effort to discourage thousands of unaccompanied children from trying to enter the U.S. illegally, President Barack Obama has instructed immigration officials to allow citizens of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to apply for refugee status in their home countries for the first time. The order, contained in a White House memo to the State Department, did not say how many refugee applications should be approved. But the program is unlikely to stem the flood of unaccompanied minors that began pouring across the Southwest border last spring.  It appears more an attempt to get as many people accepted before Congress shuts off the pipeline, not that I think that is going to happen.  What we have is just more hypocrisy.

Sweden will become the first major European nation to recognize Palestinian statehood, newly sworn-in Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced Friday. In unveiling his Cabinet appointments and governing priorities to Parliament, Lofven said recognizing the state of Palestine would bolster the objective of defining two separate but peacefully coexisting states and ending decades of hostility between Israelis and Palestinians.  As with the FedGov and claims of reduced refugees from Central America, I do not believe that Lofven is telling the truth.  The Swedes have 500 years of realpolitik experience and surely understand that recognition is just going to make the conflict continue with greater intensity.

Nine United Nations peacekeepers were killed Friday in an ambush in northeastern Mali, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in the West African country said. It was the deadliest attack on U.N. peacekeepers in Mali, which “is recovering from a military coup and an Islamist insurgency.”  “Recovering” is of course a relative term, and Mali risks more. Several of the centers of Ebola infection have borders with Mali, and fear of the disease is likely to be greater than fear of the war conditions in Mali.  But note that Jihadists have claimed the victory over the UN troops.  Sounds very much like the Islamic war is still going on.

A freelance cameraman working for NBC News in Liberia has contracted the deadly Ebola virus was flown back to the United States for treatment, and is being treated in Nebraska, according to NBC. He was symptomatic on Wednesday, when he was said to be running a slight fever and feeling achy.  If this is so deadly as some government agencies are making it out to be (for example, why the panic in Kansas City that supposedly is a false alarm?), why isn’t this man being treated someplace that isn’t near the center of the nation?  Why not send him to the same hospital in Dallas as the man who brought Ebola to the US?  I expect this action to trigger more panic.  (Like in one Dallas area school which is installing temperature monitors to “detect” students who are sick.) Of course, other government agencies are telling us “Don’t worry, be happy” because there won’t be an outbreak in the US.  We can’t believe government, no matter what they say.  So that leaves us… where?

A virus that has been causing severe respiratory illness across the country is responsible for the death of a 4-year-old boy, a New Jersey state medical examiner determined.  This brings the official death toll up to five, and the CNS News story claims that “five hundred” cases have been reported in 43 states, which is NOT what was reported just a week or so ago.  Then, several thousand cases in just a dozen states were reported.  Now, I suppose it could be that Enterovirus68 was mistakenly identified, but it seems more likely that once again, the media is listening to government and that government is NOT reporting things correctly: that they are perhaps intentionally downplaying the spread.  I do know from personal information that some kind of respiratory virus is spreading on reservations in South Dakota, with hundreds impacted on just one.

And just for grins, it seems that Marburg virus is AGAIN killing people: specifically a man in Uganda.  One more medical emergency for the world…

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is blaming shadowy forces and Colombian paramilitary gangs for the Wednesday night murder of a ruling-party lawmaker and his wife.  “I have no doubt that it was paramilitaries from Colombia who provided the advice on the methods of this killing,” Maduro said late Thursday. He also promised to find the “intellectual authors” of the crime.  I am surprised that he does not, as usual, blame the US directly (although the claim about Colombian paramilitaries is at least an indirect blame of the US, since the FedGov is supposedly in support of everything in Colombia).

Ferguson, Missouri is the cop shooting that just won’t go away.  Not only did the protestors disrupt a symphony orchestra concert (a VERY rare event) but more protests are coming, according to many reports.  This has divided people even more than the Zimmerman-Martin shooting and many others.

Good news, I figure: The new software-hardware 3D gun printing package from Distributed Defense sold out quickly, but they are selling more at the initial, discounted price.