Wet and blustery evening

Rainy and windy on the mountain. Just hoping the rain stops, and wind dries things up before freezing temps arrive sometime early tomorrow morning. That's the downside of mountain top living. Any chance of ice on the roads means it's best to stay put until thaw arrives. Sliding off the road up here can mean either brushing against a mountainside, or going off one.

Media irritated the lie got outed

CNN's Chris Cuomo seen outraged that Mueller would dare to out a fake story the media loved and breathlessly promoted.

CNN's Cuomo: “Mueller didn’t do the media any favors tonight and he did do Trump one...this allows them to say, ‘You can’t believe it. You can’t believe what you read, you can’t believe what you hear, you can only believe us. Even the SC says that the media doesn’t get it right'” pic.twitter.com/SgJG5INo5s

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 19, 2019

Sounds familiar

 “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one." - Ezekiel 22:30

Evidence of growing economic output makes the left cringe

The Left wants you to see "higher carbon output" as a cause for concern or panic.

Reality is, the sources of the carbon (power and industrial plants, trucks and aircraft) aren't running "dirtier" than they have been.

They're just running at high capacity, logging more hours, producing or moving more economic goods.

I find the new carbon stats encouraging. Hard evidence of real economic growth.

Smile for the cameras!

"It’s Nancy Pelosi’s smile that gets me…oh, and not in a good way. It’s a smile that is actually the opposite of what a smile is supposed to do: signal good will and good faith. Nancy’s smile is full of malice and bad faith, like the smiles on representations of Shiva-the-Destroyer and Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sun god who demanded thousands of human hearts to eat, lest he bring on the end of the world." - James Howard Kunstler

Europe remains in denial

A taste of it, via Twitter...

Actually... last ten has seen the Euro in a bear market vs the dollar and the ECB was forced to borrow trillions of $ to stabilize it from collapse. Happy 2019 you drunk. https://t.co/nXBIcyGAZB

— Live Monitor (@amlivemon) January 1, 2019

Welcome to 2019

There's a growing consensus we may officially be in an economic recession before it's over.  

Opening the door to 2019... Not for the faint of heart

"My view is that Mr. Mueller has run a colossal cover-your-ass operation for the many documented misdeeds among the FBI and DOJ in cooking up this mess starting in the spring of 2016." - James Howard Kunstler

The above is part of Kunstler's year end piece that also shares his outlook for the coming 2019.

Can't say I agree with all of it, but I suspect he's dead-on with some of the gloom-and-doom he sees ahead.

An amazing piece of propaganda

First an alarmist headline.

Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

Then dig deeper, it doesn't seem such an alarming circumstance after all.

Many of the "departing" teachers are departing for other school systems, according to the Wall Street Journal article. Maybe one that pays better, maybe a teaching post closer to home. Maybe some other reason. But a significant number are only exchanging one teaching job for another.

Also note, in the article, that far fewer teachers are departing teaching jobs than is the norm in other occupations.

And, according to the Journal,  stats used to alarmingly declare "most on record" only go back 17 years.

In the first 10 months of 2018, public educators quit at an average rate of 83 per 10,000 a month, according to the Labor Department. While that is still well below the rate for American workers overall—231 voluntary departures per 10,000 workers in 2018—it is the highest rate for public educators since such records began in 2001.

In  good economy, people often step up to better jobs, ones that bring more income, better working conditions. The Wall Street Journal acts as if this is something to be alarmed over.

Used to be, the Wall Street Journal cut through this kind of B-S.

This article is spun more like propaganda than analytical reporting.

The anti-American dream

Invest a dozen minutes, take this in...

Deep State not happy with Trump

Via Twitter:

Trump's opposition to the covert CIA regime change program in Syria - in contrast to Hillary's vehement support for it (she criticized Obama for restricting it) - was one of the first & biggest reasons the CIA backed Clinton in 2016 & hated Trump https://t.co/4ZJsKOgC9T

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 21, 2018

Russian meddling. Or was it Democrats?

Via Democracy Now (a very left leaning site):

The New York Times is reporting that Democratic operatives employed covert methods borrowed from Russian cyber agents on Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to sway last year’s special Senate election in Alabama. The Democratic operatives admitted to using “false flag” operations to make it look like Russian bots were helping Republican Roy Moore’s campaign. Democrat Doug Jones narrowly beat out Moore in the historically conservative state, after Moore came under intense fire as at least nine women accused him of sexually harassing or assaulting them when they were teenagers. 

BTW, last summer, CNN was still blaming Russia for dirty tricks in Alabama.