Study: ‘Small’ Nuclear War Would Destroy The World

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

With an estimated 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world, we have the power to exterminate humanity many times over.

But it wouldn’t take a full-scale nuclear war to make Earth uninhabitable, reports Live Science.

Even a relatively small regional nuclear war, like a conflict between India and Pakistan, could spark a global environmental catastrophe, says a new study.

“Most people would be surprised to know that even a very small regional nuclear war on the other side of the planet could disrupt global climate for at least a decade and wipe out the ozone layer for a decade,” said lead author Michael Mills, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

Researchers developed a computer model of the Earth’s atmosphere and ran simulations to find out what would happen if there was a nuclear war with just a fraction of the world’s arsenal.

Read more from this story HERE.

Warfare Three Ways

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

China is waging political warfare against the United States as part of a strategy to drive the U.S. military out of Asia and control seas near its coasts, according to a Pentagon-sponsored study.

A defense contractor report produced for the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s think tank on future warfare, describes in detail China’s “Three Warfares” as psychological, media, and legal operations. They represent an asymmetric “military technology” that is a surrogate for conflict involving nuclear and conventional weapons.

The unclassified 566-page report warns that the U.S. government and the military lack effective tools for countering the non-kinetic warfare methods, and notes that U.S. military academies do not teach future military leaders about the Chinese use of unconventional warfare. It urges greater efforts to understand the threat and adopt steps to counter it.

The report highlights China’s use of the Three Warfares in various disputes, including dangerous encounters between U.S. and Chinese warships; the crisis over the 2001 mid-air collision between a U.S. EP-3E surveillance plane and a Chinese jet; and China’s growing aggressiveness in various maritime disputes in the South China and East China Seas.

“The Three Warfares is a dynamic three dimensional war-fighting process that constitutes war by other means,” said Cambridge University professor Stefan Halper, who directed the study. “It is China’s weapon of choice in the South China Sea.”

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Pet Cats Infect Humans with TB for First Time

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Photo Credit: Alamy

Photo Credit: Alamy

Two people in England have developed tuberculosis (TB) after contact with pet cats in the first ever recorded cases of cat-to-human transmission, officials have said.

The two human cases are linked to nine cases of the Mycobacterium bovis infection in cats in Berkshire and Hampshire last year, according to Public Health England (PHE).

Both people were responding to treatment.

Veterinarians believe domestic cats could be catching the disease by venturing into badger setts or from rodents that have been in badger setts.

According to PHE, transmission of the bacteria from infected animals to humans can occur by inhaling or ingesting bacteria shed by the animal or through contamination of unprotected cuts in the skin while handling infected animals or their carcasses.

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The Secret Service Has a Drinking Problem

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Photo Credit: Getty Images / Chip Somodevilla

Photo Credit: Getty Images / Chip Somodevilla

One of the many pearls of wisdom that alcoholism recovery programs impart can be applied to the guys who caused the U.S. Secret Service’s latest imbroglio. It’s not that every time an agent drinks on the road, he has a problem. It’s that, whenever there’s an incident, it’s usually because he’s been drinking.

The Secret Service has a drinking problem. It’s much worse than any other cultural deficit the elite agency has. It’s more widespread than sexism, certainly, and the other isms that have been attached to the agency since the prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia. It’s something that every journalist who covers the White House kind of knows, intuitively, if they’ve ever traveled with the president. Pick your favorite White House correspondent and ask him or her whether agents on President George W. Bush’s detail created problems at the Wild West saloon in Waco. One former White House scribe told me that although reporters regularly witnessed agents drinking heavily before shifts, “we just assumed they could control themselves. After all, they were the ones who were the most responsible of all of us.”

For the most part, the agents are fine the next day. The job is stressful. But looking back at a string of incidents, many of them not well-publicized, over-consumption of alcohol is the common denominator. Sometimes, agents drinking alone make bad choices. But often, agents drinking with each other don’t have the foresight, or the ability, frankly, to tell their colleagues to stop drinking without losing face. In the Netherlands, not only was a member of the Counter-Assault Team drunk, he was falling-down drunk. He was sleeping on the floor of a hallway drunk. And several of his team members were drunk, too. And no one thought to say, at some point during the evening, “Hey guys, maybe we should call it a night. You know, the reputation of the Service and all. Let’s all go home and sleep.” No one, apparently, had the capacity to be that necessary buzzkill. The lack of internal governors on behavior is one thing. The lack of peer pressure NOT to overdrink is THE problem that the Service will try to find a way to rectify.

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Majority Threatened, Democrats Take Up Populist Agenda to Distract from Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Photo Credit: AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

By Susan Ferrechio.

Senate Democrats, facing an increasing threat of losing their majority in November, rolled out an ambitious and populist legislative agenda on Wednesday that aims to rally their base and divert voter attention away from the unpopular health reform law.

The agenda, which includes a minimum wage bill and legislation to ensure women and men are paid equally by making it easier for employees to file lawsuits, has no chance of becoming law because the Republican-run House will not take up any of the proposals.

But Democrats hope to benefit from the effort by contrasting themselves against Republicans, who they portray as a party that only cares about big corporations and the rich.

Democrats are calling their plan the “Fair Shot for Everyone” agenda.

“While Republicans defend a system that benefits huge corporations and a few at the top, Democrats will go on offense with a positive agenda that has broad support among liberals, conservatives and moderates,” Democratic leaders announced in a press release issued before they addressed reporters on Wednesday.

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Democrat Tells Americans: You’re Too Stupid to Use Our Wonderful Healthcare.gov Website

By Bryan Preston.

When it debuted in October 2013, Healthcare.gov wasn’t finished. The backend that verifies payments didn’t even work. It had major security flaws. It could not handle even a trickle of the traffic that its designers, the U.S. federal government, should have anticipated.

But Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has a message for Americans who’ve had trouble using that site: It’s your fault.

“We have hundreds of thousands of people who tried to sign up who didn’t get through,” he said. “There are some people who are not like my grandchildren who can handle everything so easily on the Internet, and these people need a little extra time. It’s not — the example they gave us is a 63-year-old woman came into the store and said, ‘I almost got it. Every time I just about got there, it would cut me off.’ We have a lot of people just like this through no fault of the Internet, but because people are not educated on how to use the Internet.” Emphasis added.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Tells Europe that Conservatism is Coupled to Putin

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yves Herman

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yves Herman

By Neil Munro.

President Barack Obama used his set-piece speech in Europe on Wednesday to couple Vladimir Putin’s crudely nationalist takeover of Crimea with the increasingly popular opposition to his big-government, progressive agenda.

“Casual indifference [to President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Crimea]… would allow the old way of doing things to regain a foothold in this young century,” he declared.

Progressive “ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power… Often this alternative vision roots itself in the notion that by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, some are inherently superior to others and that individual identity must be defined by us versus them,” he claimed.

Throughout his speech, Obama contrasted progressives’ supposedly universalist ideals with conservatives’ ideal of smaller governments that are tailored to the preferences of their unique populations.

The progressive ideals include the “United Nations and a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law and the means to enforce those laws,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Lindsey Graham: Russia’s a Gas Station Acting Like a Country

By Todd Beamon.

Russia is merely “an oil and gas company masquerading as a country,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an attack Wednesday on both Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

“The value system of Mr. Putin is that of a KGB colonel,” the South Carolina Republican said on the Senate floor, Politico reports. “I understand where he is coming from because of his value system. I just don’t agree with it.”

Graham was joined by Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire in accusing Putin of manipulating Moscow’s vast oil resources to expand its power throughout the world.

Read more from this story HERE.

WATCH – Miller: Establishment Threatened by True Reform Candidates

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World Net Daily

World Net Daily

A reporter recently asked me to talk about the DC Establishment’s war on tea party candidates. I pointed out that the Establishment sees true reform candidates and those reformers already in the Senate and House, like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Louie Gomert, as a threat to their Big Government, crony capitalist agenda. 

The Establishment elite know I am of that reform mold, and that is why groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads, Lindsey Graham’s Fund for America’s Future PAC and Freedom’s Frontier PAC, which is being run by Lisa Murkowski’s former campaign spokesman, have sided with my opponents. The Washington elite understand both of these candidates know how to play the DC game.

My opponents are also internationalists who have advocated for government action on climate change and surrendering U.S. sovereignty by adopting the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty (“LOST”).  
 
I will not dance to the internationalists’ tune. I believe the United States should never surrender its sovereignty to an international body in any capacity, especially one with the power to tax and regulate the people of our great land, as provided for in LOST.
 
“We the people” established the Constitution as the document we would live by and the form of government we would live under, rather than the authoritative edicts of some far away governing body. That is the very reason we fought the Revolutionary War in the first place.
 
If you agree that the United States should never surrender its sovereignty and authority granted by the people to the federal government, stand with our campaign.
 
I share the optimism of Thomas Paine’s words often quoted by Ronald Reagan, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We can make a difference in our day and in such a way that future generations will look back with gratitude at what we did here.


 

Planned Parenthood Founder: ‘No Matter How Early…It Was Taking Life’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in her autobiography that an abortion at any stage is the taking of a human life.

“To each group we explained simply what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life,” wrote Sanger.

Planned Parenthood, which is now the leading abortion provider in America, will this week give House Minority Nancy Pelosi, its Margaret Sanger Award. Planned Parenthood says Pelosi has earned the honor through her “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement over the course of her career.”

According to its website, Planned Parenthood traces its origins to 1916 when Sanger opened a birth control office in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1922, she incorporated the American Birth Control League to address issues such as “world population growth, disarmament, and world famine,” and in 1923, Sanger opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in Manhattan to provide contraceptives to women.

The American Birth Control League subsequently merged with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

Read more from this story HERE.

North Korean Men Ordered to Get Kim Jong Un’s Haircut

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Photo Credit: Reuters; Getty Images

Photo Credit: Reuters; Getty Images

By Bob Fredericks.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — and in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, that’s now an order!

All North Korean men are now required to get the same haircut as their nutjob leader — shaved close on the back and sides, with longer hair on top brushed back off the forehead.

The state-ordered guidelines were introduced in the capital, Pyongyang, roughly two weeks ago, according to South Korean media.

And the rule is now being enforced nationwide.

But not all of the dictator’s subjects are impressed with the strongman’s inverted bowl-style ’do.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Putin reinstitutes a Soviet-era fitness program while Kim Jong Un forces everyone to get his haircut

By Erika Johnsen.

I happened across both of these stories today out of Everybody’s Favorite Saber-Rattling Gulag State and America’s Bestest Frenemy, and I don’t even… obviously, “palate cleanser” is not the right term here. Whatever the antonym of “palate cleanser” is, this is that.

Until now, everyone in North Korea had to choose their haircuts from a list of state-approved styles. But now, all men in the hermit kingdom will be required to sport the same hairstyle as supreme leader Kim Jong Un, the BBC reports.

Pyongyang introduced the new law two weeks ago but is now rolling it out across the country. Unfortunately, some North Koreans may not be thrilled about the new look. According to a former Pyongyang resident now living in China, the Kim Jong Un cut is unpopular because it apparently resembles the style of Chinese smugglers. “Until the mid-2000s, we called it the ‘Chinese smuggler haircut,” the source told the Korea Times.

Women, however, will still be able to choose from a small variety of state-sanctioned hairstyles. So, there’s that. You’re welcome?

And over in Russia, via Charles Recknagel:

If you could turn back the hands of time, what would you wish for? For Russian President Vladimir Putin, it seems to be to return to the days of mass physical fitness. Not just of physical-education training in schools—which already exists in Russia—but of mass calisthenics in stadiums, mass parades of athletes through Moscow’s Red Square, and fluttering banners with slogans urging ‘Everyone to the Starting Line!’

Read more from this story HERE.

‘Rules Mean Nothing’ To Obama

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Just days after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress there would be no extension of the Obamacare enrollment deadline, the administration is offering an additional two weeks to anyone who begins the enrollment process by the end of the month.

“This is really one of the most audacious changes so far because several committees in Congress have been looking at all these delays and all these changes. Secretary Sebelius was asked point blank, ‘Will you extend the deadline past the March 31 enrollment date?’ And she said, ‘No, we will not,’” said Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner.

“In a separate hearing she said, ‘We don’t believe we have legal authority to do that.’ But that’s what they’ve done anyway. So they’re basically going before Congress that people have until March 31. Clearly, they’re not getting the enrollment they wanted. Therefore, they’re going to ask people, ‘Well, did you try to enroll? Did you have any trouble? If so, then we’ll extend the deadline for you. Rules mean nothing to this administration,” Turner said.

After initially stating that seven million sign-ups were needed, the administration has lowered the target goal to six million and stated that more than five million have signed up. However, neither Sebelius nor any other administration official will confirm how many Americans have actually paid their first month’s premiums. Sebelius said she doesn’t know because private insurance firms have that data. Turner isn’t buying it.

“I don’t believe that she doesn’t know. She hides behind the fact that they don’t have any way of knowing that. Part of it is because the website is still not built, as far as being able to allow people to pay. But I think if they knew and that were a big number, we would hear about it,” said Turner, who noted that House Republicans are now going directly to the insurance companies to determine how many enrollees have actually paid their premiums.

Read more from this story HERE.