California Assembly OKs Health Care for Immigrants in U.S. Illegally
May 29th, 2019It’s as if California fought a war with some external enemy and lost.
Except, most Californians didn’t notice.
And now…
Via: AP:
The California Assembly voted Tuesday to extend the state’s Medicaid program to eligible adults who are in the country illegally.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to spend about $98 million a year to cover low-income immigrants between the ages of 19 and 25 who are living in the country illegally. The state Senate’s budget proposal would also add coverage for people 65 and older living in the country illegally.
The state Assembly’s bill would cover all immigrants in California living in the country illegally over the age of 19.
Buckle Up: A Crash Trigger Has Hit
May 29th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge:
The bond market is telling us, that the markets… and the economy… are both in very serious trouble.
The difference between the yield on the 3-month Treasury and the 10-year Treasury (called the yield curve) is inverted.
What this means is that yield on the 10-Year Treasury is LOWER than the yield on the 3-month Treasury… this ONLY happens when investors get panicked about the near-term… and flock to long-term Treasuries as a safe haven.
What could happen to trigger such an event?
Well, the last time the yield curve hit these levels at the end of a business cycle was in late 2006… right as the housing market rolled over… and the US began its move into the worst recession in decades.
Indeed, an inverted yield curve is almost always a warning that the economy is moving into a recession.
The stock market is usually quick to follow. The last two times the yield curve inverted like this were March 2000… right when the Tech Bubble burst… and late 2006… right as the housing bubble burst… and about 12 months before the Great Financial Crisis…
China Gears Up to Weaponize Rare Earths in Trade War
May 29th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Beijing is gearing up to use its dominance of rare earths to hit back in its deepening trade war with Washington.
A flurry of Chinese media reports on Wednesday, including an editorial in the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, raised the prospect of Beijing cutting exports of the commodities that are critical in defense, energy, electronics and automobile sectors. The world’s biggest producer, China supplies about 80% of U.S. imports of rare earths, which are used in a host of applications from smartphones to electric vehicles and wind turbines.
…
The U.S. shouldn’t underestimate China’s ability to fight the trade war, the People’s Daily said in an editorial Wednesday that used some historically significant language on the weight of China’s intent.
The newspaper’s commentary included a rare Chinese phrase that means “don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The specific wording was used by the paper in 1962 before China went to war with India, and “those familiar with Chinese diplomatic language know the weight of this phrase,” the Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, said in an article last April. It was also used before conflict broke out between China and Vietnam in 1979.
High Radiation Levels Found in Giant Clams of Marshall Islands Near U.S. Nuclear Dump
May 28th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times:
Researchers have found high levels of radiation in giant clams near the Central Pacific site where the United States entombed waste from nuclear testing almost four decades ago, raising concerns the contamination is spreading from the dump site’s tainted groundwater into the ocean and the food chain.
The findings from the Marshall Islands suggest that radiation is either leaking from the waste site — which U.S. officials reject — or that authorities did not adequately clean up radiation left behind from past weapons testing, as some in the Marshall Islands claim.
‘American Soil’ Is Increasingly Foreign Owned
May 27th, 2019Via: NPR:
American soil.
Those are two words that are commonly used to stir up patriotic feelings. They are also words that can’t be be taken for granted, because today nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.
When the stock market tanked during the last recession, foreign investors began buying up big swaths of U.S. farmland. And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign-owned, it’s been left up to individual states to decide on any limitations.
It’s likely that even more American land will end up in foreign hands, especially in states with no restrictions on ownership. With the median age of U.S. farmers at 55, many face retirement with no prospect of family members willing to take over. The National Young Farmers Coalition anticipates that two-thirds of the nation’s farmland will change hands in the next few decades.
Astronomers Concerned About Starlink Light Pollution
May 27th, 2019Well, it’s not just me.
Via: Forbes:
SpaceX had kept the logistics of each satellite under wraps prior to the launch, but following the launch it was revealed that each satellite had a relatively large solar panel, perfect for not only gathering but reflecting sunlight back to Earth. This means anyone looking up at the stars, from any location on Earth, would always have the final Starlink constellation in view, for better or worse.
“It turns out that these satellites are easy to see with our own eyes, much brighter than we were expecting,” says astrophysicist Darren Baskill from the University of Sussex in the U.K. “If we can see them with our eyes, that means they are extremely bright for the latest generation of large, sensitive ground-based telescopes.”
Such telescopes include the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction and designed to take wide sweeping views of the night sky to study a variety of bodies such as asteroids and comets.
While the true impact of Starlink isn’t known yet, it’s thought the LSST may have to deal with one Starlink satellite every few images, notes astrophysicist Bruce Macintosh from Stanford University in the U.S., resulting in a streak through the image. Such issues are not new to astronomers, but the sheer number of Starlink satellites is cause for concern.
“Part of the knee-jerk reaction across the astronomy community after the launch of the Starlink satellites was purely caused by a lack of information,” says astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the U.S. “A significant amount of the outcry could have been avoided if there had been an impact study done in advance.”
Rare Earth Metals: China’s ‘Nuclear Option’ In The Trade War
May 27th, 2019Via: oilprice.com:
A simple visit to an obscure factory by Chinese President Xi on Monday is all it took to raise the specter that China could be contemplating cutting off supply of critical materials to the U.S. and potentially crippling large swathes of its industries. Also, fueled by political innuendo in Xi’s recent call for a new “Long March” in reference to a key founding tenet of the Chinese Communist Party, speculators are growing increasingly wary of Chinese export restrictions to the U.S., including rare earth minerals.
…
China produced more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of these critical elements over the past decade, though its share was lower at 71.42 percent last year.
In 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey identified 35 minerals critical to the country’s economy and national security. America is heavily dependent on imports of these minerals, producing less than a tenth of the world’s supplies and importing half of what it consumes. It clearly highlights the U.S.’ soft underbelly.
Not surprisingly, rare earth minerals are some of the few products that escaped Trump’s latest tariffs.
The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper
May 27th, 2019Via: The Atlantic:
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.
Limited Hangout: ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects
May 26th, 2019My best guess is that this Pentagon/CIA/To the Stars operation is a limited hangout, but to what end, I have no idea.
A limited hangout is:
“Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”
At some level, there probably exists much more knowledge about the nature of the objects in the videos than we are being told.
We can’t know if these objects are related to the government’s missing $21 trillion, but if they’re not, I wonder: What technology was the military able to obtain with that kind of money?
You see, the missing trillions never comes up in conjunction with the mainstream media’s fascination with this Pentagon/CIA driven UFO narrative. However, the two are almost certainly related.
Even assuming that there is no prosaic explanation for what we’re seeing, I think there’s at least better than even odds that an American is at the controls (possibly by remote) of the craft shown in the videos.
And don’t, for one second, take the pilots’ bafflement at what they’re seeing as indicative of anything. They will be kept as in the dark as you and me when it comes to compartmented technologies.
While I’d like to know what they’re showing us, I am far more interested in Why Now? and To What End?
Via: New York Times:
The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”
See Why Tesla Scares The Legacy Players
May 26th, 2019Via: CleanTechnica:
EVs are the future, and Tesla is the undisputed market leader, especially in the US, but also globally. If you’re an automaker on the wrong side of this trend, it must be terrifying!
