Huge solar storm which could WIPE OUT modern technology expected by 2020

TECH BLACKOUT – Huge solar storm which could WIPE OUT modern technology expected by 2020 | Science | News | Daily Express:
Researchers have warned that there is roughly a 12 per cent chance that a solar storm could smash into Earth by the end of the decade.
The powerful event would likely be as huge as the Carrington Event, which occurred on 1859.
The solar storm which hit 150 years ago was so powerful that its southern auroras could be seen as far north as Queensland in Australia.
Today, in a modern world so dependent on technology, the implications would be far more severe.
Solar storms can wreak havoc on global technology as the radiation which pummels our planet heats up the outer atmosphere, causing it to expand.
This means that satellite signals will struggle to penetrate the swollen atmosphere, leading to a lack of Internet service, GPS navigation, satellite TV such as Sky and mobile phone signal.
...A solar flare erupted on the far side of the sun on June 4, 2011, and sent solar neutrons out into space.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a mid-level solar flare, an M8.7-class, – as seen in the bright flash in the middle.
He said: “Even if it’s off by a factor of two, that’s a much larger number than I thought.”
A solar storm the size of the Carrington Event would cost an estimated $2trillion to the US economy in the first year it struck, with a 2008 report from the National Research Council stating that it could take up to 10 years to fully recover..."

Steve Russo - Bringing A Knife To A Gun Fight As you may already...

Steve Russo - Bringing A Knife To A Gun Fight As you may already...:
"Bringing A Knife To A Gun Fight
As you may already know, Somali Refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan has been identified as the POS who ran over and stabbed 9 people on the Ohio State University campus Monday morning.
Officials still aren’t ready to call this an Islamic terrorist attack, even though the actual Islamic terrorist himself called it just that, but it really was an Islamic terrorist attack.
Before a campus police officer killed him, Artan was a proud, devout Muslim who ironically didn’t like that the media portrayed Muslims as terrorists.
So as a Muslim he committed an act of terror to prove them wrong. And the left are once again in a state of denial.
The Left suffers from a chronic condition called ABI. ”Anything But Islam.”
Sufferers of ABI will blame anyone and anything for an Islamic terror attack before they blame the Islamic terrorist for the attack.
So when a Somali Muslim refugee rams his vehicle into pedestrians and starts knifing them, the sufferers of ABI go on hyper-drive to blame... guns!
Yes, think about that.
An Islamic radical terrorist, once again on American soil, went on a rampage using a car, then next... a butcher knife at Ohio State, and the fault is ...our "gun culture."
The initial reports were all over the place. So your first inclination was to wait and see.
Obviously, not for those on the left.
Because the first reports said there was a shooter.
Then, reports came out that the suspect rammed his vehicle into people.
Others were saying the suspect was a man with a knife.
The initial conclusion was there must be two men – one with a gun and one with a knife.
That didn’t stop the sufferers of ABI from swooping in right away and jumping to all kinds of conclusions.
So... it must be a GUN!
Doesn't matter if it's true or not.
Or who used the gun.
It's the "Gun Culture."
I present the super genius who was almost our Vice President.
The second stupidest man to ever become VP, next to Joe Biden.... Senator Tim Kaine
"Deeply saddened by the senseless act of gun violence at Ohio State this morning. 
Praying for the injured and the entire Buckeye community"
Maybe he was talking about the racist white cop that shot the poor, misguided Somali terrorist?
http://dailycaller.com/…/meet-the-hero-who-killed-osu-atta…/"
Lots more here. Read on!

Michigan School Pensions Not Supposed To Be A Ponzi Scheme

Michigan School Pensions Not Supposed To Be A Ponzi Scheme [Michigan Capitol Confidential]: "A story in the Detroit Free Press described why the state’s largest teachers union thinks the underfunded school pension must keep enrolling newly hired employees: If new people are not enrolled in the system, then “new teachers won’t be contributing anything into the existing pension system for older and retired teachers.”
The newspaper spoke to Doug Pratt of the Michigan Education Association.
Like many, Pratt appears to believe that the pension system is supposed to run like a giant Ponzi scheme, where payments to earlier entrants require fleecing a steady stream of new “marks.” 
The misunderstanding is understandable — this is how the federal Social Security system is run — but it’s still incorrect.
ForTheRecord says: The reason Ponzi schemes are illegal — and the reason the Michigan Constitution prohibits using that model for government pensions — is that the racket eventually runs out of new marks to fleece.
In reality, each employee’s future pension benefits are supposed to be fully paid for in the same year they are earned.
“Paid for” means the employer and employee both contribute enough each year so that over several decades the pension fund’s investments grow enough to cover the individual’s pension checks.
This means that even if the employer never hires another person, money already in the pension fund is supposed to cover all the promises made to all the system’s existing members.
Properly managed pension systems do not require a fresh stream of new entrants to work.
And new entrants don’t help a system when it is underfunded.
Unfortunately, the state has failed to adequately fund the school pension system, resulting in its current $26.7 billion shortfall.
But alas, paying off that debt requires more taxpayer cash, not more school employees.
“Catching up” on that underfunding will take years, but in the meantime, two things are clear:
First, new employees should not have their own pension contributions looted to cover pension promises made decades ago to current employees and retirees.
Nor does the system require new employees to pay for current of future pensioners.
Second, going forward, the state should stop digging a deeper hole.
It can do this by no longer promising lifetime benefits from the broken system to every new teacher who is hired. 
That is what the Michigan Legislature is expected to debate in the current lame duck session."

'Pissed off' dad of Jamiel Shaw Jr. explains how liberal immigration lies harm black Americans

'Pissed off' dad of Jamiel Shaw Jr. explains how liberal immigration lies harm black Americans:

"Jamiel Shaw Sr. has been fighting the lonely battle against illegal immigration since 2008, when his 17-year-old son, Jamiel Shaw Jr., was gunned down in broad daylight by illegal alien gang members in the sanctuary city of Los Angeles. It was determined at trial that Jamiel Jr., who had no criminal record or ever any history with gangs, was targeted and killed due to the color of his skin.

The elder Shaw helped create Jamiel’s Law, a proposed ordinance to deport known illegal alien gang members, and has testified before Congress multiple times on the matter. But after years of advocating for tighter immigration enforcement at local, state, and federal levels, only to be met with dead-ends and closed doors, Shaw found an ally in President-elect Donald Trump.

Four Simple Reasons Not to Trust Iran

Four Simple Reasons Not to Trust Iran:

• Iran threatens its citizens yet again. 
• It threatens the United States. 
• It threatens its Arab neighbors. 
• It says it will soon head a global caliphate.

1. Iran Predicts It Will Lead Global Caliphate Before End of Century... 

2. Iran Threatens to Scrap Nuclear Agreement...

3. Arab League to Iran: Stop Bragging...

4. Iran Forbids Interviews With Foreign Farsi Media...

AM Fruitcake

History for November 30

History for November 30 - On-This-Day.com:
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) 1835 - Writer ("Tom Sawyer," "Huckleberry Finn"), Winston Churchill (Britain) 1874, Allan Sherman 1924


Richard Crenna 1926, Dick Clark 1929 - Television personality ("American Bandstand"), G. Gordon Liddy 1930 - Radio talk show host, convicted for his role in the Watergate burglaries in 1972


1782 - The United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.


1853 - During the Crimean War, the Russian fleet attacked and destroyed the Turkish fleet at the battle of Sinope.


1858 - John Landis Mason received a patent for the first pepper shaker with a screw-on cap.


1875 - A.J. Ehrichson patented the oat-crushing machine.


1940 - Lucille Ball and Cuban musician Desi Arnaz were married.


1954 - In Sylacauga, AL, Elizabeth Hodges was injured when a meteorite crashed through the roof of her house. The rock weighed 8½-pounds.


1971 - ABC-TV aired "Brian's Song." The movie was about Chicago Bears' Brian Picolo and his friendship with Gale Sayers.


1989 - PLO leader Yasser Arafat was refused a visa to enter the United States in order to address the U.N. General Assebly in New York City.

Are there any adults left in the Democratic Party? | New York Post

Are there any adults left in the Democratic Party? | New York Post:

"But now the liberal circus has come to town, and — unlike Republicans, who had leaders like Paul Ryan and Ben Sasse and Mike Lee and Mitt Romney to at least try to provide adult supervision — the absence of grownups is impossible to ignore.

Since Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, Democrats’ behavior has been sad to watch."

Worthless high school education "earns" free college?-----Mayor to launch Detroit Promise registration for tuition-free community college

Mayor to launch Detroit Promise registration for tuition-free community college | MLive.com: "Students who graduate from any Detroit high school are being offered two-year scholarships covering community college tuition.
And Mayor Mike Duggan is officially launching the "Detroit Promise" registration process at 1:45 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 28 at Communication & Media Arts High School, 14771 Mansfield St.
More than 700 Detroit high school graduates from the class of 2016 are now attending community college or university after receiving the Detroit Promise funding, according to the mayor's office.
The Detroit Promise Zone Authority and Michigan Education Excellence Foundation oversee the program with funding through the Detroit Regional Chamber.
Detroit promises tuition-free community college to every high school graduate -- public, private or charter
Every student who graduates from any high school in Detroit — public, private or charter — was promised two years of funding for community college tuition on Tuesday.
In 2013, the Michigan Education Excellence Foundation launched a narrower version of the plan, and in March 2016, Duggan launched the Detroit Promise Zone Authority, dedicating a portion of tax dollars generated by that entity to fund two-year scholarships.
Applications for the funding are available here."

A Monster and his Suck-Ups: Fidel Castro, 1926-2016

A Monster and his Suck-Ups: Fidel Castro, 1926-2016 :: SteynOnline
"Who knows when Fidel Castro actually kicked the bucket? But this weekend his brother decided to let us in on the secret. His presidential term lasted, gosh, an awfully long time, as The New York Times reminded us:

Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II.

That's one way of putting it. But in the end, when it comes to ruthlessly holding on to power, no one can compete with Her Majesty, and so that piker Castro got relegated to second place, while millions of English, Canadians, Jamaicans, Bahamians, Barbadians, Grenadians, etc, still groan under the jackboot of the Queen.

Elsewhere in the US media, The Nation offered a more local comparison:

Castro almost outlasted 11 US presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and passing in the waning days of Obama's last term. Perhaps he just couldn't bear the thought of President Donald Trump.

Impressive. How exactly did he manage to outlast all those here-today-gone-tomorrow US presidents? As I wrote in Maclean's eight years ago:

What's wrong with this picture?

"Saying he is no longer healthy enough to hold office, Cuban leader Fidel Castro has announced he will not seek re-election after 49 years in power" — the Miami Herald.

Hmm. Castro didn't really have to "seek" re-election, did he? He's a — what's the word? Oh, yeah — "dictator." If he "seeks" re-election, he's pretty much guaranteed to find it — assuming for the purposes of argument you can be "re-elected" if you've never been freely or fairly elected in the first place. In its own "news report," the satirical website The Nose on Your Face got closer to reality:

"Fidel Castro announced today that he would not seek a new term as Cuba's president, citing concerns that at 81, it may be difficult for him to serve the full, constitutionally-mandated 49-year term."

Yeah, yeah, but who are you to preach? Back to The Nation:

Having been sanctimoniously lectured by all 11 US presidents on what constitutes proper democratic procedure, he might have thought Trump, about to take office with a minority of the vote and with significant voter suppression, a vindication..."

Veterans protest at Massachusetts college that removed US flags | Fox News

Veterans protest at Massachusetts college that removed US flags | Fox News:

"Around 1,000 veterans gathered at a western Massachusetts college Sunday to protest the school’s decision to stop flying all flags, including U.S. flags, after students allegedly burned a flag in protest of Donald Trump’s election victory.

Hampshire College in Amherst outraged many with its decision to remove all flags from campus. Protesters expressed their displeasure and hoped to reach out to students during their demonstration."

Is This The Democrats' Real Strategy In Launching Recounts?

Is This The Democrats' Real Strategy In Launching Recounts? | Zero Hedge
"Over the past couple of days we've written numerous times about Jill Stein's recount efforts in WI, MI and PA (see here, here and here).  
And while it's clear that Stein intends to move forward with recounts in all three states (she's now up to $6.1mm in donations), what is unclear, and quite perplexing, is exactly why she's pursuing these recounts in the first place.  Here are the potential justifications from Stein's perspective, as we see them:

1. Personal self-interest? - Obviously, No.  With less than 1% of the vote in WI, MI and PA, Stein obviously has no shot of winning any of the states in question.
2. Hopes of recount tipping states to Hillary? - No.  Multiple experts and even Hillary campaign insiders have admitted that overturning election results with a margin of victory of several 1,000 votes is extremely unlikely.  To win, Hillary would have to flip WI, MI and PA even though she trails by ~20k, ~12k and ~70k votes in each of those states, respectively...not going to happen.
3. Exposing voting machine hacking? - No.  Even the Obama administration has confirmed the the election was "free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective" and that votes "accurately reflect the will of the American people."  By failing to present even a shred of evidence of vote tampering in her WI recount petition, instead choosing to focus on wild conspiracy theories, Stein effectively also admits that there was no "hacking" of voting machines.
4. Fundraising scam to get millions in donations from disaffected Hillary voters? - Maybe.  As of right now, Stein has raised ~$6mm of the $7mm she says she needs to fund recount efforts.  Assuming Stein goes through with recounts in all three states and her cost estimates are reasonably accurate then she won't really have that much money left over to be added to the general Green Party coffers.

So, with no practical reason for forcing recounts, what exactly is Jill Stein up to?...
Read on!

Trump administration will pressure foreign states to probe Clinton Foundation

Trump administration will pressure foreign states to probe Clinton Foundation | New York Post
"Foreign governments will be encouraged to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s finances, as many are already turning off money spigots to the scandal-scarred group, The Post has learned.
A source close to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team told The Post that the new administration plans to pressure the US ambassadors it will name to bring up the foundation with foreign governments — and suggest they probe its ­financial dealings.
Trump said last week that he would not order an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server or her role in the foundation.
But Trump’s statement didn’t preclude the backroom moves to investigate the group.
“Haiti and Colombia will be key diplomatic posts for this ­because of all the money ­involved,” said the source.
In Haiti, recently leaked ­e-mails indicate “Friends of Bill” Clinton may have been given priority from the State Department as it prepared to spend some
$10 billion in aid after a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010.
...The Australian government last week announced that it would end its decade-long affiliation with the Clinton Foundation — a commitment that had amounted to as much as $25 million, according to the foundation’s Web site.
Norway is also scaling back.
The country donated about $25 million in 2015.
Foundation donations dropped by 37 percent to $108 million last year.
Hillary Clinton left the foundation to run for president in April 2015 but Bill and daughter Chelsea Clinton remained on the board of directors.
It’s not clear whether Hillary will ­resume her role on the board."

Lunch video-----A Word To The Criminal Migrant

Noon-toon

Students Fed Up with Politically Biased Professors Are Hitting Back with a New Weapon: Professor Watch List

Students Fed Up with Politically Biased Professors Are Hitting Back with a New Weapon: Professor Watch List:

"Boasting 1000 plus chapters nationwide and a presence in all 50 states, the four-year-old organization prides itself on developing conservative activists who stand up to big government in and out of their universities. The Professor WatchList is a culmination of years of information gathering from conservative students who feel that radical leaning professors give no space for unpopular thinking in the classroom. Think of the website as the new ratemyprofessor.com but for conservative, libertarian-leaning students."

In "other news"-----Shootings spike over Thanksgiving holiday weekend: 8 killed, 62 wounded

Shootings spike over Thanksgiving holiday weekend: 8 killed, 62 wounded - Chicago Tribune:
"Chicago saw one its most violent Thanksgiving holidays in years, with eight people killed and 62 others wounded between late Wednesday afternoon and early Monday.
The toll towers over the number of shootings in the previous two Thanksgiving holiday weekends, according to data kept by the Tribune.
In 2014, five people were killed, including a woman inside the Nordstrom's store on Michigan Avenue, and 14 others were wounded. Last year, eight people were killed, including a 16-year-old boy, and 20 were wounded, the data show.
This year's tally does not include the three people shot dead by Chicago police over the holiday period.
In one of those shootings, authorities said officers fired at a man who had just shot two people, one of them fatally, early Friday in the Homan Square neighborhood on the West Side.  In another shooting Sunday night, authorities said an officer shot and killed a man who wounded a pregnant woman in West Garfield Park.
Early Saturday in the South Chicago neighborhood, a 20-year-old man was killed and five others were wounded at a house party, police said.
The number of people shot in Chicago this year is around 4,000, more than 1,000 above this time last year, according to Tribune data.

Development bills are crony capitalism on steroids

Development bills are crony capitalism on steroids | MLive.com:
"A Michigan Senate committee last month took a quick vote to pass several bills that could offer massive financial payouts to real estate developers, including Dan Gilbert, the law's chief private-sector advocate.
The legislation, Senate Bills 1061-1065, resembles tax increment financing laws on steroids.
TIF allows for collection of revenues — usually local property taxes — generated from alleged growth of a particular development.
The proposed legislation would also allow local personal income taxes and sales and use taxes to be earmarked for private developers.
This proposal is old wine in new skin.
Programs such as this are designed to do one thing: 
Transfer wealth from the many to a few. 
Michigan has had and continues to operate many programs that do this.
The crony capitalists who benefit most are typically well-connected politically. 
They often they get what they ask for: Red Wings owner Mike Illitch persuaded state and local governments to help him finance his new hockey stadium, and $250 million of it is expected to come from a TIF arrangement.
The chief argument supporting this new legislation is that "but for" special treatment, such development would not happen.
This talking point was repeated ad nauseum by apologists for the Michigan Economic Growth Authority, a business subsidy program.

The assertion is tough to disprove, since lawmakers tend to give the business projects what they ask for, making it hard to know what might have been.

• MEGA was the state's highest-profile business incentive program. The Snyder administration stopped giving out new awards, but the state is still paying out about $1 billion this year on old refundable tax credits. It's a hefty price tag, but the jobs promised rarely materialized — only 2.3 percent of awards met or exceeded projections. Lawmakers should be skeptical that these schemes improve the state after reading what the economic literature says about them. Of the five scholarly studies done on the MEGA program, four found a zero to negative impact and the fifth only showed a small positive one.

• The TIF literature is equally unflattering. A 2015 Ball State University study found that TIF districts in Indiana were actually "associated with less employment, less taxable income and slightly higher tax rates." A 2010 University of Chicago Law Review article finds, "There is little clear evidence that TIF has done much to help the municipalities that use it, and it is also a source of intergovernmental tension and a site of conflict over the scope of public aid to the private sector."...

99% Muslim, 43,000 Somali refugees settled in US under Obama

99% Muslim, 43,000 Somali refugees settled in US under Obama | Washington Examiner
The Obama administration resettled 8,858 Somali refugees in the United States last year, and nearly 43,000 during Obama's eight years, a huge number that is now raising concerns after a Somali refugee led a one-man attack spree on the campus of Ohio State.
Like Syrian refugees, there is no adequate way to check the backgrounds of the Somalis, according to the head of the Center for Immigration Studies.
...The Center also reviewed other data Monday and told Secrets that some 97,000 Somali refugees have been resettled in the United States since 9/11. 
Of those, 99.6 percent were Muslim, and 28,836 (29.7 percent) were males between the ages of 14 and 50.
"We have no way of vetting people from any of the failed states of the Islamic world, whether Somalia or Libya or Yemen or Afghanistan or Iraq. 
The latter two actually we have more intelligence on, having ruled them for a number of years, but even that information is of limited use; we admitted two Iraqis as refugees who, we only discovered later, had been [improvised explosive device] makers back in Iraq.
And the FBI fears dozens more such terrorists have been admitted as refugees.
"Oh, and we resettled nearly 9,000 Somali refugees last year."

Democratic Party Lost Governors & State Legislature Seats in 2016 Election | National Review

Democratic Party Lost Governors & State Legislature Seats in 2016 Election | National Review:

"The Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming more ideological, or at least more openly and self-consciously ideological, as the party’s progressivism becomes more and more a catechism. This has the effect of making the Democratic party less democratic. American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative,"

Fix teacher retirement crisis today

Fix teacher retirement crisis today:
"Here in Michigan — and in Detroit especially — we’re far too familiar with what happens when we leave retirees’ future in the hands of politicians.
Underfunding.
Benefit cuts.
Bankruptcy.
In the aftermath?
Michigan taxpayers always get stuck paying for the politicians’ mess.
Well don’t look now, but the same warning signs the politicians ignored for years in the Motor City are on full display in the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System.
...Without action, the entire retirement system is in serious jeopardy.
There’s a crisis coming for Michigan’s educators, the kids they teach, and the parents who pay their salaries.
Michigan’s public teacher retirement system — commonly referred to by Lansing insiders as MPSERS, or “mipsers”—is so dramatically underfunded that teachers’ pensions are at risk, current efforts just to catch-up are taking more than $700 per pupil out of the classroom each year, and new teachers understandably worry that the their benefits may not be there when they retire.
The massive pension system is facing a staggering $26.7 billion unfunded liability.
To fully fund the benefits Lansing has guaranteed our teachers, the fund needs $67.7 billion in the bank.
 There’s only $41 billion in the fund..."

AM Fruitcake

History for November 29

History for November 29 - On-This-Day.com:
Louisa May Alcott 1832, Busby Berkeley 1895, C.S. Lewis 1898


Suzy Chaffee 1946 - Skier, Garry Shandling 1949 - Comedian, actor, Howie Mandel 1955 - Actor, comedian


1890 - Navy defeated Army by a score of 24-0 in the first Army-Navy football game. The game was played at West Point, NY.

1892 - A patent was issued to Almon Brown Strowger for the rotary dial.


1929 - The first airplane flight over the South Pole was made by U.S. Navy Lt. Comdr. Richard E. Byrd.


1961 - The Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft was launched by the U.S. with Enos the chimp on board. The craft orbited the earth twice before landing off Puerto Rico.


1975 - Bill Gates adopted the name Microsoft for the company he and Paul Allen had formed to write the BASIC computer language for the Altair.


1981 - Actress Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina Island, CA, at the age 43.


1987 - A Korean jetliner disappeared off Burma, with 115 people aboard.


1994 - The U.S. House passed the revised General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.