It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.

Babe Ruth, Historic Home Run Hitter
And he wasn't even thinking about Jihads in those days but I am thinking Jihads these days

Election Gaming "Fraud" in Primary Elections in the USA:  Making Sure Your General Election Opponent is a Real Loser
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudulentElections.htm

Table of Contents

Funding Losers

 Communications Juggernauts in Crossover Voting Frauds

Funding Opponent Scandals

Top Republicans are working hard to help Bernie Sanders ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/gop-works-hard-to-help-bernie-sanders-2016-1
This is possibly one of the reasons Sanders is beating Clinton in Red States like Wyoming.

Is Donald Trump a Democratic secret agent?
Anthony Zurcher --- http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35066940 

Historically, the ocean has been a bit too powerful to harness wave energy successfully. Oscilla Power has come up with a new approach designed to withstand the forces of the ocean and generate electricity cleanly, meaningfully, and endlessly ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-12/this-device-could-provide-a-third-of-america-s-power?cmpid=BBD041216_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=

Trump part of conspiracy to ensure Clinton presidency ---
Jeb Bush --- http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/8/jeb-bush-suggests-donald-trump-part-of-conspiracy-/
Jensen Question
Is such a conspiracy necessary given the slate of losers running as GOP candidates for President in 2016?

The Black Panther: Newspaper of the Black Panther Party ---  https://libcom.org/history/black-panther-newspaper-black-panther-party

"How university students infantilise themselves," by an infantile Jonathan Zimmerman, AEON, April 15, 2016 ---
https://aeon.co/opinions/how-university-students-infantilise-themselves?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f9a2b533d4-Weekly_Newsletter_15_April_20164_15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f9a2b533d4-68951505

. . .

Asking administrators to solve every problem infantilises students, even as it contributes to the top-heavy bloat of our universities. Our students need to grow up, in the most political way, by wresting control of the educational process from an administrative bureaucracy that wields way too much authority already.

Jensen Comment
This is tantamount to letting the inmates run the asylum. Such a university controlled by students would soon become an anarchy that achieves little other than chaos. A good analogy is the Venezuelan prisons that are now run by prisoners who carry their own guns, share cells with prostitutes, get high on cheap drugs, and come and go from prison as they please. No wonder Venezuela is the most crime-ridden nation in the Western hemisphere.

The first rules of business on a student-controlled democratic campus are no more homework and no more grades. The second rule of business is nude cocktail lounges in all the dorms. Free booze becomes a budget priority.

More seriously power would shift to gangs like it has in Venezuelan prisons ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Venezuela
Complete democracy is unworkable  Gangs gel into power structures. Power structures clash with other power structures. Eventually a powerful dictator like Castro emerges to restore order. Free beer might survive as a way of placating the masses. Castro provides for beer in ration cards available to all Cubans. This prevents rioting in the streets.

"History of a Climate Con:  Al Gore had a revelation: Energy taxes would be a loser for Obama," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/history-of-a-climate-con-1460502164?mod=djemMER

How’s this for an irony? As state attorneys general gin up a fake securities-fraud case against oil companies over climate change, starting with Exxon Mobil Corp.

the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a real securities-fraud investigation of the nation’s biggest solar power company. SunEdison allegedly exaggerating its amount of cash on hand to resist an impending bankruptcy.

A little history is in order to appreciate the cynical nadir of climate politics in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it from media coverage, but the closest the U.S. Congress came to passing a serious (if still ineffectual) cap-and-trade program was during the George W. Bush administration in early 2007. Then, within days of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Al Gore announced a revelation: the “climate crisis” no longer required such unpleasant, de facto energy taxes. The problem could be solved with painless handouts to green entrepreneurs.

Hooray! Everybody loves a handout. The activist duo Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus noted that the shift in Mr. Gore’s thinking was “highly significant.” “He knows that cap-and-trade, and most any new regulation, would raise energy prices—a political nonstarter during a recession.”

A proposed oil tax swiftly disappeared from the Obama transition website. With control of all three branches of government in hand, the imminent climate threat to humanity suddenly appeared not so urgent after all—passing a “signature” health-care law did.

Democrats, it turned out, were in favor of climate root canal only when Republicans were in charge.

OK, this is old hat, but what should be striking is how thoroughly the climate lobby has played along. Its main function today has become stringing up apostates as a distraction from Democratic unwillingness to propose policies costly enough that they would actually influence the rate of increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Take the Exxon prosecution, promoted by the attorneys general of New York and California and a host of their Democratic brethren. Though the case is never meant to be adjudicated in a courtroom, suppose it were and suppose a jury somehow found for the plaintiffs. How would Exxon pay a securities-fraud judgment? By selling oil and gas.

Attacking Exxon is not climate policy making; it’s a distraction. Its purpose is to foster an atmosphere conducive to the Gore-Obama green pork-barrel strategy.

Or take Sheldon Whitehouse, the U.S. senator who has gained notoriety lately by urging the Justice Department to launch a RICO investigation of climate skeptics. He doesn’t urge his Rhode Island constituents to adopt the life-style sacrifices that would actually reduce fossil-fuel consumption. Mr. Whitehouse’s devotion to understanding climate science at all is so microscopic that, in his latest letter of complaint to the Journal, the only science he cites is a Gallup poll.

Or take Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times insisting that if you don’t vote Democratic this fall, the planet is doomed. The colossal unmentionable is that climate activism today exists to promote the Democratic agenda, whatever it may be this week. One thing it isn’t, though, is advocacy of, or even mention of, policies that might actually alter the course of climate change.

The president’s power-plant rules, even if climate models are accurate, would affect global temperature a century hence by 0.03 degrees Celsius. His fuel mileage rules, though costly to Detroit and a life-support for Tesla, would have even less effect.

The renewable subsidies that SunEdison exploited so recklessly that it may soon be in chapter 11 are good for killing birds. The non-binding Paris agreement Mr. Obama signed in December explicitly stipulates that India and China, the two fast-growing emitters, will keep on emitting as if no agreement had been signed.

We could go on—not that, under any circumstances, a serious whack at global greenhouse emissions was ever in the cards.

Continued in article

"Climate Crowd Ignores a Scientific Fraud:  A defective radiation-risk standard holds back our most important low-carbon energy source," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-crowd-ignores-a-scientific-fraud-1460758426?mod=djemMER

Green activists, some masquerading as attorneys general of New York and California, want to prosecute Exxon XOM -0.54 % as a climate heretic. Its sin? Saying impeccably true things about climate science: The range of uncertainty is high. Climate models are not the climate, and show themselves to be unreliable guides to future warming. There is a cost-benefit test that policy must pass, and it doesn’t.

The AG case is a spinoff of “investigative” journalism by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, which we now learn was directly underwritten by climate activists at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund.

“It’s about helping the larger public understand the urgencies of finding climate solutions. It’s not really about Exxon,” explained a Rockefeller official about a January meeting to coordinate the legal and journalistic attack.

The journalists involved in this travesty, we’re sorry to say, are of the dumber sort—confused about what science is. But their clottedness comes at a poignant moment.

Honest greens have always said nuclear power is indispensable for achieving big carbon reduction. James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who has been chaining himself to fences since the first Bush administration, was in Illinois last week lobbying against closure of a nuclear plant. Ditto activist Michael Shellenberger. We might also include Bill McKibben, the Bernie Sanders of the climate movement and shouter of Exxon accusations, who told journalist William Tucker four years ago, “If I came out in favor of nuclear, it would split this movement in half.”

Nuclear (unlike solar) is one low-carbon energy technology that has zero chance without strong government support, yet is left out of renewables mandates. It’s the one non-carbon energy source that has actually been shrinking, losing ground to coal and natural gas.

What keeps nuclear costs high? Why do so many opponents misread the Fukushima meltdown, where 18,000 deaths were due to the earthquake and tsunami, none to radiation exposure, and none are expected from radiation exposure? Why has the U.S. experience of spiraling nuclear construction costs not been matched in South Korea, where normal learning has reduced the cost of construction?

The answer increasingly appears to be a real scientific fraud. In a series of peer-reviewed articles, toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows how a cabal of radiation geneticists in the 1940s doctored their results, and even a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, to exaggerate the health risk from low-level radiation exposure. At the time, Hermann Muller, their leader, was militating against above-ground atomic-bomb testing. “I think he got his beliefs and his science confused, and he couldn’t admit that the science was unresolved,” Mr. Calabrese told a UMass publication.

Data developed to show high-dose effect on fruit flies, Muller claimed, showed a proportional low-dose effect. Thus was born LNT—the “linear no-threshold” model of radiation risk that has become the world’s go-to standard for nuclear safety, source of repeated (and unfulfilled) forecasts of thousands of cancer deaths from Chernobyl or Fukushima. LNT is why nuclear plants shoulder huge costs not to protect against accidents, but to protect against trivial emissions. Coal-plants, which don’t have to meet U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, actually put out thorium and uranium far in excess of what nuclear plants are allowed to emit.

We detailed some of the health evidence in a December piece about efforts to wake up the NRC. The New York Times wrote a similar piece last September looking at Japan’s foolish evacuation of thousands of Fukushima residents against a nonexistent radiation threat.

Dr. Carol Marcus, of the UCLA medical school, and two other nuclear-medicine specialists last year petitioned the NRC to re-evaluate its standards. Now the Environmental Protection Agency and several green groups have filed defenses of LNT, which since the 1950s has been adopted not only as Washington’s unscientific model of radiation risk, but as the EPA’s unscientific model of chemical risk. It shouldn’t be overlooked that, for these green groups and the EPA, nuclear is also anathema because it competes with solar and wind.

OK, science seldom fares well in high-stakes political controversies, but it’s bizarre to watch green campaigners attack anybody who questions their thinly based climate predictions, then attack anybody who questions the thinly based science that keeps down our best carbon-free energy choice.

An environmental reporter with an ounce of independence would actually be doing his or her green friends a favor. Pushing the greenies to confront their nuclear contradictions is probably the best possible way right now of making progress on the climate conundrum.

"GM Cancels Plan to Build Small Cadillac at Orion Plant in Michigan:  Auto maker scraps additional $245 million investment, as vehicle to be built in Kansas instead," by John D. Stholl, The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-cancels-plan-to-build-small-cadillac-at-orion-plant-in-michigan-1460405140?mod=djemCFO_h

Jensen Comment
I mention this because Kansas Governor Sam Brownback received a lot of criticism in the liberal press because his sizeable 2013 tax cuts did not appear to have the desired impact on economic growth in Kansas ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-leachman/kansas-economic-growth-continues-to-lag_b_8684454.html

What many biased analysts opposed to trickle down economics neglect to disclose is that tax cut impacts have lag time, sometimes very long lag time, in bringing home economic growth. The classic example is when the President Reagan tax cuts took so long that it was President Bill Clinton who managed to balance the Federal budget due in large measure to the Reagan tax cuts.

After at Ten Year Court Fight Google just scored a major victory against US authors ---
http://qz.com/652744/google-just-scored-a-major-victory-against-us-authors/

A ten-year long case against Google has finally seen its end.

Today, the US Supreme Court announced it had declined to hear Authors Guild v Google, a pivotal case that pitted book authors’ rights against the tech giant’s desire to build a massive digital library. In doing so the court quietly sided with Google, agreeing with previous rulings that its massive book scanning project is legal.

In 2005, the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for authors’ rights, sued Google for its book scanning initiative, then called the Google Books Library Project. The digital giant had scanned 20 million books and released them online without permission from their authors, with the goal of making books more findable and searchable. At the time, Google also ran ads on the scanned pages (they’ve since stopped); the guild argued that Google was infringing on writers’ copyright and depriving them of potential income.

Though Google removed its ads, the case continued, changing dramatically from a dispute about monetary compensation to one about how to treat creative work in a time of mass digitization. Ten years later, in 2015, a court of appeals ruled again against the authors, saying that the book scanning project was protected under “fair use”—by digitizing, Google Books had transformed the books, and therefore was not in violation of copyright:

Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function is a transformative use, which augments public knowledge by making available information about Plaintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the Plaintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.

Current US law protects works based on pre-existing works, if they add something or make something new out of the original. But an amicus brief filed in February by big-name writers like Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, and Malcolm Gladwell argued that “the internet was not anticipated” when fair use was defined in 1976. Today, derivative works, no matter how transformative, may spread to millions in an instant, all while trading heavily on someone’s creative ideas without compensation.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on April 20, 2016

VW nears deal on diesel-car crisis
Volkswagen AG is preparing to offer a buyback to U.S. owners of some diesel-powered vehicles and payments to others, ahead of a Thursday court deadline to address cars it has long known violate air pollution rules. But VW is no longer alone in this particular problem. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. said employees improperly manipulated fuel-economy data on at least 625,000 vehicles, the latest self-inflicted wound for a company with a history of scandal.