Tag: ice

ICE Melt in Minnesota

ICE, Minnesota, shooting, protest, riot, violence

Americans are strongly united against people being gunned down on our streets by federal agents.

Saturday, the victim was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse working at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. Pretti was an American citizen with a conceal-carry permit. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino quickly informed the public: “During this operation, an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots.

“The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID,” added Bovino. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Had this farfetched narrative been even close to true, maybe we could partly reconcile the killing we witness relentlessly in cellphone videos. I like to reserve judgment until all the facts are in, but to me the videos don’t implicate Pretti as a “terrorist” in the slightest and leave little doubt that, in law enforcement lingo, this was not at all a “good shoot,” i.e. a justified use of deadly force.

Yesterday, President Trump told The Wall Street Journal that he had a “very good telephone conversation” with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “The president agreed the present situation can’t continue,” offered Frey.

This change is driven democratically: Republicans at the White House, in Congress and across the country know the voters will crush them if this continues through the fall elections.

Now if voters can only unite on reform beyond merely stopping the shooting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ice, Minnesota, protest, riot, shooting, violence

crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Cold Truth

One of the climatic shifts supposed to be happening to our traumatized planet is the melting of polar ice into huge puddles of slush, with maybe a few polar bears helplessly drifting on the dwindling ice floes of a rising sea.

The alleged calamities of various alleged major climatic changes are allegedly due solely to human civilization. We can render the latter doctrine more plausible if we ignore all the major variations of climate that transpired for millions of years before mankind and industrial civilization showed up.

Anyway, if polar ice were indeed melting away over the long term, we could argue about the causes and effects.

But it doesn’t seem to be happening.

According to research at the University of Copenhagen using photographs and satellite data, the glaciers of Antarctica have been pretty stable over the last 85 years or so. (The SciTechDaily article about the findings calls this stability an “Antarctic Anomaly.”)

With the help of modern computer technology and aerial photographs going back to 1937, the researchers managed to track how the glaciers of East Antarctica have changed over the decades.

They found that “the ice has not only remained stable but also grown slightly over the last 85 years, partly due to increased snowfall. . . . While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10-20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance.”

Uh oh.

Chicken Little never had it so tough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags climate change, global warming, hysteria, ice, weather

international affairs

Buying Ice

Greenland, Trump, land, territory, purchase, ice,

The president wants to buy more land.

On our dime.

“The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer’s imagination,” began a Wall Street Journal report last week. Donald Trump has asked about it anyway, “with varying degrees of seriousness.”

Grønland — “Kalaallit Nunaat” — is Danish territory now. But the United States does run the Thule Air Base on the glacier-dominated island already. So it might seem . . . natural.

The last major American purchase of territory from another sovereign power was, actually, from the Kingdom of Denmark back in 1917, when the United States obtained the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The notion of buying Greenland was floated back during the Truman administration, too. So there is ample precedent. Which gives Trump a plausible context to advance a destabilizing meme for his upcoming visit to Denmark, where he will no doubt be doing some “negotiating” . . . about more important matters.

And what might those be? Well, matters like the country’s contributions to its own defense. Denmark is low on the list of contributing NATO participants, devoting only 1.7 percent of GDP to defense, not the treaty level of 2 percent.

It’s mainly just amusing, of course — probably even to Trump himself. “It’s just something we’ve talked about,” he’s explained. “We’re very good allies with Denmark. We’ve protected Denmark like we protect large portions of the world, so the concept came up.”

Of course, the U.S. doesn’t need Greenland. And it certainly doesn’t need to spend money it doesn’t have to do so.

Still, there have been and will be more idiotic proposal floated this election season. Plenty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.