The Iranian nuclear deal null and void! A Limerick.

The Iranian Nuclear appeasement:

For Mullahs was quite an achievement.

In a year, give or take

there’ll be nukes, much at stake.

It’s time for a real peace agreement.

According to an article in Iran Watch (http://www.iranwatch.org/our-publications/articles-reports/irans-nuclear-timetable) Iran has enough Uranium to make a number of Nuclear bombs in a very short time.

Using their 6000+ centrifuges agreed to under this contract they can produce 1 nuclear bomb in 1 year assuming they only use the 5060 Ir-1 centrifuges allowed to be operated under the contract and use only natural Uranium as fuel (0.7% U235).

If they use all 9000 existing separators they can produce 1 bomb in 6.8 months. In fact, they have been running them since negotiations began and have now reached the limit of 300  Kg reactor grade Uranium (3.5% U235), enough to produce one Nuclear bomb.

Since they did break the contract Sunday July 7, they are free after 35 days to use all 9000 centrifuges to produce weapons grade Uranium at the rate of 1 bomb every seven weeks.

They also have 1080 IR-2 centrifuges currently not yet operating, far more efficient than the IR- 1 centrifuges ready to be started up.

In addition they have 20% enriched Uranium in the form of yellow cake. This used to be UraniumHexaFlouride gas, ready for further enrichment. According to the agreement it was “neutralized” into yellow cake so it couldn’t be further enriched. It takes less than two weeks to convert it back to gas, and another two weeks to enrich it to weapons grade Uranium. They have enough of this to make 1 bomb.

So, this is why the Mullahs exclaimed: We Won! Death to America!

After the contract is finally totally broken the first bomb will be ready less than 1 month, after that, 1 bomb every seven weeks!

And then again, who is to say that they do not already have nuclear bombs? Deep down in mountains are their military “research” facilities dug down, impervious to normal bombs, with radiation shielding doors so no external measurements can be made by nuclear inspectors. In a side deal, the Iranians are going to do the inspections themselves to assure all is above board and no cheating occurs.

Quite a negotiating feat for the Obama administration!

No wonder president Trump did not force congress to ratify it as a treaty, but declare it no longer valid!

Tweeting diplomacy yields results. A Limerick.

Step in the Demilit’rized Zone

Trump showed he can wing it alone

For he didn’t tell Xi;

Tweeted Kim: Come and see.

Diplomacy better than drone.

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See what can be done without “deep state” career diplomats!

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This was Kim Jong-un’s reaction when president Trump thanked him for coming with such a short notice. (if you only knew)

The tweet that started the ball rolling:

Donald J. Trump

After some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon). While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!

They talked for over forty minutes in the very small “treaty room” in the DMZ.

Donald Trump got the Ellis Island medal of honor award, A Limerick.

Awards from the Island of Ellis

The Democrat racists are jealous

Donald Trump shared the prize

with Ms. Parks; they tell lies.

He’s racist, that’s now what they tell us.

In 1986 the Ellis Island Medal of Honor was given for the first time. It is an American award founded by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO), presented annually to American citizens whose accomplishments in their field and inspired service to our nation. Among the very first recipients were:

Joe DiMaggio: An American baseball center fielder who played his entire 13-year career in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak. He is also widely known for his marriage and lifelong devotion to Marilyn Monroe.

Victor Borge: A Danish and American comedian, conductor, and pianist who achieved great popularity in radio and television in the United States and Europe. His blend of music and comedy earned him the nicknames “The Clown Prince of Denmark,” “The Unmelancholy Dane,” and “The Great Dane.”

Anita Bryant: An American singer and political activist. She scored four Top 40 hits in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including “Paper Roses“, which reached #5 on the charts. She was also a former Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner, and was a brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission (which marketed orange juice) from 1969 to 1979. In the 1970s, Bryant became known as an outspoken opponent of gay rights in the US. In 1977, she ran the “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This involvement significantly damaged her popularity and career in show business.    In spite of her downfall defending traditional family values she was recognized at this event.

Muhammad Ali: born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer and activist. He is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century. From early in his career, Ali was known as an inspiring, controversial, and polarizing figure both inside and outside the ring. He converted to Islam and as such refused to be drafted into the military.

Rosa Parks: An activist in the Civil Rights Movement, whom the United States Congress called “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to give up her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled.

Donald Trump: Yes, He too was honored. This in no way negates his lifelong compassion for sports, showbiz, political activism, religious freedom and civil rights.

Obama and Trump signs the Westminster Abbey guestbook. What a difference! A Limerick.

President Barack Obama signs the Westminster Abbey Guestbook, May 24, 2011.

Image result for obama signs westminster abbey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 3, 2019 President Donald Trump does likewise.

Image result for Trump signs westminster abbey 2019

 

Obama and Trump sign the book

On Brexit, a different look.

No more “last in the queue,”

trade for me, trade for you.

The year is important, just look.

Queation: Who is more presidential?

The one that can’t even get the year right. or the one that thanks the hosts for the “special place”?

 

China is seriously considering restricting rare earth exports to the US. Why is that important?

One week ago, President Xi and Vice Premier Liu He, China’s top trade negotiator, visited a rare earth metals mine in Jiangxi province. This has led to the rumor that China is seriously considering restricting rare earth exports to the US. China may also take other countermeasures in the future. The trade negotiations between U.S. and China got a lot more serious. It extends far beyond tariffs and intellectual property, it now involves strategic materials.

The first thing we must realize is that rare earth metals are not all that rare. They are a thousand times or more abundant than gold or platinum in the earth crust and easy to mine, but a little more difficult to refine. Thorium and Uranium will  also be mined at the same time as the rare earth metals since they appear together in the ore.

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U.S. used to be the major supplier of rare earth metals, which was fine up to around 1984. Then the U.S. regulators determined that Uranium and Thorium contained in the ore made the ore radioactive, so they decided to make rare earth metal ore subject to nuclear regulations with all what that meant for record keeping and control. This made mining in the U.S. unprofitable so in 2001 the last domestic mine closed down. China had no such scruples, such as human and environmental concerns, so they took over the rare earth metals mining and in 2010 controlled over 95% of the world supply, which was according to their long term plan of controlling the world by 2025.

Rare Earth Element Production

The U.S. used to have a strategic reserve of rare earth metals, but that was sold off in 1998 as being no longer cost effective or necessary. Two years later the one U.S. rare earth metals mine that used to supply nearly the whole world, the Mountain Pass Mine in California closed down, together with its refining capacity. From that day all rare earth metals were imported. In 2010 it started up again together with the refining capacity but went bankrupt in 2015, closed down the refining but continued selling ore to China. They just announced they will start up refining again late 2020. Meanwhile China is slapping on a 25% import tariff on imported ore starting July 1. Rare earth metals may be in short supply for a while.

So, why is this important? Just take a look at all the uses for rare earth metals. The most sought after pays all the cost of mining and refining, and the rest are readily available at nominal cost.

The Chinese almost got away with it, and that is but one reason the trade negotiations are so complicated and hard fought, but necessary. Donald Trump fights for reciprocity and fair competition.

The Presidential Commission on Climate security (PCCS). A Limerick

Commission to study what’s best:

The Climate Security quest;

CO2 keeps alive

plants and animals thrive.

The end of the world? No, it’s blest.

Item: March 20, 2019. A federal judge temporarily blocked new oil lease auctions in Wyoming on Tuesday after finding the Department of the Interior “did not sufficiently consider climate change” when proposing the lease sales, The Washington Post reports.

Washington D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled the government violated federal law and did not fully study the environmental impact of oil development on 300,000 acres of federal land.

Meanwhile, a massive coalition of environmental organizations, activists, and think-tank leaders signed a letter to President Donald Trump supporting the proposed Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS), as well as the work of Trump climate and national security adviser Dr. William Happer of Princeton University.

A small excerpt from the letter:

It (the commission) would be charged with conducting an independent, high-level review of the Fourth National Climate Assessment and other official reports relating to climate and its implications for national security. Serious problems and shortcomings have been raised repeatedly in the past by highly-qualified scientists only to be ignored or dismissed by the federal agencies in charge of producing the reports. Among major issues that have been raised and that we hope the commission will scrutinize: the models used have assumed climate sensitivities to CO2 concentrations significantly higher than recent research warrants; the models used have predicted much more warming than has actually occurred; predictions of the negative impacts of global warming have been made based on implausible high-end emissions scenarios; the positive impacts of warming have been ignored or minimized; and surface temperature data sets have been manipulated to show more rapid warming than has actually occurred.
The letter is signed by over 150 scientists and organizations.

 

What is a national emergency? I am puzzled.

After a long and successful career as an engineer, starting in Sweden and emigrating to the U.S. I got a job offer I couldn’t refuse, an opportunity to teach what is called the capstone course for engineers to be at the Pennsylvania State University in Happy Valley PA, trying to convert them from students excelling in cramming to world class engineers.. Thinking I’ll do it for a couple of years and then retire for good I accepted. Not knowing when to quit I am still doing it, in part because of the number of foreign students and the cross cultural interactions I observe when there are students from India, China, the Middle East and various other countries in the teams. This semester I have the privilege of having a tri-lingual student speaking fluent French, English and Kirundi.

Image result for burundi

She does a double major, and as all of the female engineering students I have experienced thus far is very motivated. This is neither here or there, but where do they speak Kirundi? Looking up Burundi in Wikipedia, I find the United States has declared a national emergency with respect to Burundi. It was the last national emergency declared by President Obama, and President Trump renewed it last fall. Burundi is a beautiful country in the middle of Africa with about 11 million people and an annual GDP of less than 4 billion dollars. You do the math. The national emergency deals with four corrupt officials in Burundi.

Just one question for politicians. Why do some not consider the situation at our Southern Border, considering drug smuggling and human trafficking, a national emergency when four Burundi corrupt officials is?

If you care about climate change, vote Republican!

The Climate change pace in this plot

shows voting this fall means a lot.

No original sin

if Republicans win

since temperatures will be less hot.

From Wattsupwiththat.com comes this interesting plot: (Thanks, David Middleton)avid Middleton)

From this we can see that the global temperature changes according to hadcrut4gl are:

During the presidency of George H W Bush temperatures fell by 0.20 C/decade

During the presidency of Bill Clinton temperatures rose by 0.26 C/decade

During the presidency of George W Bush temperatures fell by 0.04 C/decade

During the presidency of Barack H Obama temperatures rose by 0.42 C/decade

So far , during the Presidency of Donald J Trump global temperatures have receded 0.24 C.

It seems the hot air has gone out of Washington.

Any questions?

 

 

Forty nine years ago the space future looked bright. A Limerick.

Forty nine years ago the space future looked bright. A Limerick.

wbI remember it like yesterday. We sat up late in the evening of July 20 1969 and watched the first landing on the moon, in real-time and transmitted over all 3 networks. Later President Nixon commented: “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.” Be that as it may, it was watched by about 500 million people world-wide and the future looked bright. Look at us since then:

Forty nine years ago was a “small step for man.”

Obama made sure that we no longer can.

But with Trump we’ll be back

Space Force One to attack.

So we say, “Donald Trump, You da man!”

 

But God. Why evangelical Christians have hope. “How Great Thou Art”

Twenty-two years a girl was born with undeveloped optical nerves and mild cerebral palsy. She was not expected to live more than at most one year. But God had other plans for her. At age two she began to sing. Her love for singing praises to God has never ceased. And so, in God’s providence she was chosen to sing at the 2017 inauguration interfaith prayer service. And sing she did! Her name is Marlana VanHoose, a little girl, but with a voice.

Image result for the 2017 inauguration prayer breakfast how great thou art

Meanwhile, the media was busy tracking the protest rallies all around Washington that day. I watched all day and never saw it.

How did the audience that was privileged to watch react? It is worth to listen to it a second time, this time around watching the reaction of the public in attendance, notably Melania Trumps reaction.

After the song Melania led the standing ovation to acknowledge God’s grace, not only for the song, but for the whole day and for the whole presidency.

This is what give us evangelicals hope. She not only sang it, she also sang the third and fourth verses, so often omitted in public settings, especially in interfaith services. Why is that so important?

Let us look at the history of “O store Gud”, and how it came to be the most favored Hymn of at least three presidents before Donald Trump!

Clouds have always been my fascination. They come and go, form and disappear, cool by day and warm by night. But most impressive of all are thunderstorms, forming when the temperature and humidity are high, transport a lot of water vapor to higher elevations, there condensing as rain or ice, coming down, cooling and watering the earth. Clouds and thunderstorms are the thermostat of the earth. Without it the earth would respond like climate models, predicting a sharp temperature rise as carbon dioxide levels increase. The models are all flawed, since they predict a hot spot in the troposphere over the equator, but there is none. The thunderstorms in the tropical doldrums take care of that. “Settled science” instead has settled on ignoring the lack of the hot spot, for to acknowledge it would make the global warming claim invalid.

I thank God for providing us with a thermostat that protects the earth from overheating, and especially for thunderstorms!

Such was the case in July 1885, when Carl Boberg,  a 26 year young pastor of a Mönsteråsvikensmall congregation of the Swedish Missionary society was the honored guest of the ladies’ auxiliary annual picnic, held in a meadow near Mönsteråsviken, (a bay of the Baltic Sea in southeastern Sweden). The day was perfect, the sky was clear, pleasant temperatures, the cows were grazing on the meadow, the birds were singing, in short,  a pastoral idyll. Then it happened. In a few short minutes thunderclouds appeared out of nothing. There was no time to go home, so they all sought shelter in a barn close by. The rain came down hard, and lightning struck a nearby tree. Then as suddenly as it started the rain stopped and all was calm. In Sweden it turns much cooler after a thunderstorm, and the birds sing like they got a new lease on life.

They all went home, and the young pastor pondered the events of the day. He

080419-11, digital 28,8 mb RAW, 12-00 Koltrast, Turdus merula Uppland
080419-11, digital 28,8 mb RAW, 12-00
Koltrast, Turdus merula
Uppland

heard the Coalthrush singing its melodic, beautiful drill and in a distance he heard the church bells ringing from Kronobäck’s church. The bay was calm like a mirror, and inspired he started penning the song “O store Gud”. Here is the first verse:

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the works Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Refrain:
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

He continued to write and write of all the mighty works that God has made and what He has given us through His word, and continued long into the night. Before going to bed he had penned over twenty verses. The next Sunday he wove the poem into his sermon. They all loved it, but that was about it. Slowly the word got around the poem was pretty good, after much editing down 9 verses were published in the local newspaper Mönsteråstidningen in 1886. Carl Boberg didn’t make any efforts to publish it further, and was surprised when he heard it sung a few years later to a Swedish folk melody (in 3/4 tempo). This was then published in the periodical “Sanningsvittnet” (witness of the truth)  in 1891.

It was translated into German by an Estonian, Manfred von Glehn. Five years later it was translated into Russian by Ivan S. Prokanoff, the Martin Luther of modern Russia. It was published in a book with the title “Cymbals”.

Later, while in the Carpathian Mountains of what is now Western Ukraine the English Missionary couple Hine heard the song sung in Russian, this time as a wandering song in march tempo. He got impressed by God’s great works in the Polish mountains, and as Stuart Hine heard the people singing it on their way to church he penned a translation. This become the second verse:

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Refrain

From now on the English version is different than the Swedish original. This is the origin of the third verse: It was typical of the Hines to ask if there were any Christians in the villages they visited. In one case, they found out that the only Christians that their host knew about were a man named Dmitri and his wife Lyudmila. Dmitri’s wife knew how to read — evidently a fairly rare thing at that time and in that place. She taught herself how to read because a Russian soldier had left a Bible behind several years earlier, and she started slowly learning by reading that Bible. When the Hines arrived in the village and approached Dmitri’s house, they heard a strange and wonderful sound: Dmitri’s wife was reading from the gospel of John about the crucifixion of Christ to a houseful of guests, and those visitors were in the very act of repenting. In Ukraine (as I know first hand!), this act of repenting is done very much out loud. So the Hines heard people calling out to God, saying how unbelievable it was that Christ would die for their own sins, and praising Him for His love and mercy. They just couldn’t barge in and disrupt this obvious work of the Holy Spirit, so they stayed outside and listened. Stuart wrote down the phrases he heard the Repenters use, and (even though this was all in Russian), it became the third verse that we know today:
And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Refrain

The second world war broke out, and the Hines were forced to return back to England, but they continued their ministry. The fourth verse was was added by Stuart Hine after the Second World War. His concern for the exiled Polish community in Britain, who were anxious to return home, provided part of the inspiration for Hine’s final verse. Hine and David Griffiths visited a camp in Sussex, England, in 1948 where displaced Russians were being held, but where only two were professing Christians. The testimony of one of these refugees and his anticipation of the second coming of Christ inspired Hine to write the fourth stanza of his English version of the hymn. According to Ireland:  One man to whom they were ministering told them an amazing story: he had been separated from his wife at the very end of the war, and had not seen her since. At the time they were separated, his wife was a Christian, but he was not, but he had since been converted. His deep desire was to find his wife so they could at last share their faith together. But he told the Hines that he did not think he would ever see his wife on earth again. Instead he was longing for the day when they would meet in heaven, and could share in the Life Eternal there. These words again inspired Hine, and they became the basis for his fourth and final verse to ‘How Great Thou Art’: 

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: “My God, how great Thou art!”

Refrain

The complete song was soon published, not in England but in the Soviet Union (in English).  The famous Gospel singer George Beverly Shea got hold of it, liked it a lot, but he wanted to change two words in the first verse: Instead of works, he wanted to use worlds, and instead of mighty he wanted to use rolling. Very reluctantly Stuart Hine agreed, but only for use in the Billy Graham Crusades. It was first sung in Canada in 1955. It became so popular that in Billy Graham’s 1956 New York Crusade it was sung at all 99 events, and from there the song spread out through all the world, even back in Sweden where the new version became the popular one. One of the visitors to this Crusade was the little boy Donald Trump, who went with his Father and Mother and Brother (and Sisters?) to listen. God’s word never returns void.

God works in mysterious ways.

God works in all and through all.

God is.