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2016

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A word from a toxicologist who defected from the federal junk science army By John Dale Dunn

By on March 15th, 2016

Last week, I discovered Frank Schnell when he wrote a comment on formaldehyde and said it was not a cancer-causing agent and that the EPA had lied about it. His comment was on an American Council on Science and Health posting by Josh Bloom, Ph.D. (organic chemistry), with a 20-year history of pharmaceutical research. Bloom busied himself in the post eviscerating a scare-monger on formaldehyde from the enviro-fanatic group National Resources Defense Council, and did a good job, but in the third or fourth comment, I saw a gem – a brief but insightful discussion by a man who described himself as a Ph.D. toxicologist retired from the Communicable Disease Center – Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for 20 years.

Katy, bar the door.

In his comment on the formaldehyde issues, Schnell displayed his expertise and his knowledge of EPA misconduct as a view from the belly of the beast. He outlined the science misconduct directed by the EPA and its agency allies, supported by fanatic environmentalists inside and outside the government.

I thought, This is like Whittaker Chambers exposing the ugly underbelly of commie infiltration of the American government, because not only was Schnell a Ph.D. toxicologist, but he knew how to explain how the EPA and other federal agencies promulgate junk science. I told Bloom I needed more from this man, and he asked for a more fleshed out discussion from Dr. Schnell on EPA misconduct. I was not disappointed.

I have a modest archive here at American Thinker that includes essays on EPA misconduct. Steve Milloy, proprietor of JunkScience.com, and I have written some articles on the same subject together for AT. We focus on EPA cheating on air pollution research but also human experimentation with air pollutants.

All of our efforts are intended to show that EPA sponsors scare-monger scientists who promote the idea that small particle and other air pollutants are deadly when they are not. We have written a number of essays about how the EPA cheats on science and creates false scares. Here is a guy who can confirm the nature of the deceit that we saw and understood from the outside, and he knows the how and why and even the motives. What a find.

Read this wonderful man’s explanation in multiple articles that I admire and applaud from his ACSH archive, but also look at his archive at Science 2.0. For those who are interested in the politics, he is lucid; for those who are interested in getting into the scientific weeds, he is plenty smart and easy to understand.

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Europe Emasculated By James Lewis

By on March 15th, 2016

Feminism and multiculturalism held the victim down while Islam wielded the knife.
In Sweden, the headline goes, in the small town of Oestersund, “Women are warned not to go out at night to avoid multiple sex attacks by “foreigners.”

As in most of Europe and a good chunk of America — like the White House — the honest word for Muslim sex attackers cannot be said.

It is taboo.

Jihadist attackers constantly look for signs of weakness, and nothing shows weakness more than failing to protect your women and children. Protecting the in-group may be the most basic role for human families, clans, tribes, and entire civilizations. But after decades of multicult self-indoctrination, Europe has managed to emasculate itself.

This is not just a metaphor. It is real, as you can see if you take a trip over there.

The Oestersund police chief is quoted in the news as saying that the local police simply did not have the resources to cope with roving gangs of Muslim teenagers looking for girls to rape.

But historically there were no police in places where people lived. (“Police” means “man of the city”). There were very few cities, and many villages and lonely farms. You couldn’t call 911, and in any case, organized help had to come from miles away. There was the militia — the one the Founders referred to in the U.S. Constitution. But for everyday purposes there were just male volunteers, the neighbors, who would respond to local dangers by defending the village. They were usually fathers or grown males, but everybody recognized a common duty to fight danger. Farm women were often very strong, and they would join in.

“The police” as an official force did not exist until a few centuries ago. Instead, every citizen, especially strong men and boys, would rush to defend a woman or child in danger. In every civilization before Multicultified Europe, it was the men who defended the women.

Apparently Sweden has totally lost one of the most important roles of men, seduced by PC propaganda.

Male gang attacks are the rule in Jihad warfare, just like the ancient warrior tribes of Mohammed’s Arabia. The Vikings and the Mongols and Cossacks were the same. Go back in history, and that kind of piratical rapine is the norm, as we can see in Homer’s Iliad, which glorifies the war of revenge conducted by the Greeks after the beautiful Helen was raped and kidnapped by the Trojans.

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Anti-GMO Students Bruise a Superbanana Research on the vitamin-fortified fruit could help malnourished Africans, but well-fed collegians at Iowa State University want no part. By Julie Kelly

By on March 15th, 2016

Student activists at Iowa State University are up in arms after researchers offered to pay them almost a thousand bucks to eat some genetically modified banana. The bananas, created by an Australian scientist, contain high levels of beta carotene, which converts to vitamin A when eaten.

Vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness, stunting and even death, is a devastating problem throughout the developing world. In Uganda roughly 40% of children under age 5 are vitamin-A deficient, according to a 2011 health survey.

The hope is that fortified superbananas could help prevent such malnutrition. To test their efficacy, Iowa State students were offered $900 to eat the bananas for four days during three trial periods, then have their blood tested to measure vitamin absorption. The research is led by ISU professor Wendy White, an expert on vitamin A-enriched crops.

But some of the healthy, well-fed college students in America’s heartland were outraged. In February they delivered a petition with more than 57,000 signatures to the university to oppose the so-called human feeding trials. The petition was also delivered to the Seattle headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is investing more than $2 billion to improve agriculture in the developing world, including through the banana project.

“While we can all support the rights of Ugandans to have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food, Ugandans have expressed increasing concern that genetically-modifying bananas are not meant to serve that purpose,” a group of students wrote in the Ames Tribune. “Instead, many suspect the GM bananas to be an attempt to corporately capture the domestic seed market.”

They sound like they’re trying to save an organic garden in Berkeley. “Those students are acting out of ignorance,” Jerome Kubiriba, the head of the National Banana Research Program in Uganda, tells me. “It’s one thing to read about malnutrition; it’s another to have a child who is constantly falling sick yet, due to limited resources, the child cannot get immediate and constant medical care. If they knew the truth about the need for vitamin A and other nutrients for children in Uganda and Africa, they’d get a change of heart.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Al Qaeda Turns Sights on Africa Success Story Attack in Ivory Coast by jihadist group’s North African affiliate signals a change in targetsBy Drew Hinshaw

By on March 15th, 2016

For 12 years, al Qaeda’s franchise in the Sahara has focused its attacks on the continent’s weakest and poorest states. Now it has turned its violence on a new kind of target: an African success story.

For nearly an hour on Sunday, gunmen in bulletproof vests stalked vacationers on a beach in Ivory Coast, Africa’s largest cocoa producer and its fourth-fastest-growing economy.

By the time security forces arrived and killed the three attackers, at least 15 civilians—most of them locals who had been drinking beer and enjoying the surf on a sunny afternoon—and three soldiers were dead.

Among the dead were four French nationals, French President François Hollande said on Monday, along with a German national identified as Henrike Grohs, who had been the director of the Goethe Institute in Ivory Coast since 2013. Ivory Coast Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko added that other victims came from Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Mali.

The commando-style raid confirmed growing fears across West Africa that al Qaeda fighters are turning their attention to the region’s most flourishing states with the aim of exacting the highest possible toll of civilian lives.

With grenades strapped to their waists, the three fighters crept through a parking lot, shooting people standing next to BMW and Peugeot sedans. On the beach, they killed sunbathers reclining next to coolers and beach balls, and fired at swimmers. The nationalities of the attackers remained unclear on Monday.

“They were shooting in the direction of everybody eating along the beach,” said Yves Losseau, a Belgian lawyer who spends several weeks each year in the area.

On Monday, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Saharan affiliate of al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack, said it was a warning to other African countries that cooperate with France in its counterterrorism efforts. Some 18,000 French citizens live in the former French colony.

The attack appears to mark a turning point for Islamist militancy in Africa. Since 2003, AQIM has taken root in Mali, Mauritania, Niger and other desperately poor landlocked countries that have territory forming part of the Sahara. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Barack Obama Checks Out A journalist takes a deep dive into the president’s shallow mind. Crises to follow. Bret Stephens

By on March 15th, 2016

Barack Obama—do you remember him?—will remain in office for another 311 days. But not really. The president has left the presidency. The commander in chief is on sabbatical. He spends his time hanging out at a festival in Austin. And with the cast of “Hamilton,” the musical. And with Justin, the tween sensation from Canada.

In his place, an exact look-alike of Mr. Obama is giving interviews to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, interviews that are so gratuitously damaging to long-standing U.S. alliances, international security and Mr. Obama’s reputation as a serious steward of the American interest that the words could not possibly have sprung from the lips of the president himself.

I was a bit late in reading Mr. Goldberg’s long article, “The Obama Doctrine,” which appeared last week and is based on hours of conversation with the president, along with ancillary interviews with John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Manuel Valls of France, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other boldface names. Kudos to Mr. Goldberg for his level of access, the breadth of his reporting, the sheer volume of juicy quotes and revealing details.

Still, it’s a deep dive into a shallow mind. Mr. Obama’s recipe for Sunni-Shiite harmony in the Middle East? The two sides, says Mr. Obama, “need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood,” sounding like Mr. Rogers. The explanation for the “sh— show” (the president’s words) in Libya? “I had more faith in the Europeans,” he says, sounding like my 12-year-old blaming her 6-year-old sister for chores not done. The recipe for better global governance? “If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy,” he says, sounding like—Barack Obama.

Then there’s Mr. Obama the political theorist. “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence,” the president says in connection to Vladimir Putin’s gambles in Ukraine and Syria. That’s true, in a Yoda sort of way. But isn’t seizing foreign territory without anyone doing much to stop you also a form of “real power”? Is dictatorial power fake because it depends on the threat of force? CONTINUE AT SITE

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Tony Thomas The Settled Science of Grant Snaffling

By on March 15th, 2016

Perthaps you read about the recent academic paper which examined glaciers from a feminist perspective, an exercise that cost US taxpayers some $413,000. Well, the paper itself should prompt not laughter but outrage, not least because Australian “social scientists” are on the same gravy train
Feminist glacier studies, an expanding field of academic climate-science rigor, sometimes needs an R-rating. Like this new feminist glacier research from a team led by Professor Mark Carey at the University of Oregon. Carey scored a $US413,000 grant in 2013 for his glacier research, with the paper being one output from it. It is titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”

The epic, 15,000-word monograph cites Sheryl St Germain’s obscure, 2001 novel, To Drink a Glacier, where the author is in the throes of her midlife sexual awakening. She “interprets her experiences with Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier as sexual and intimate.[i] When she drinks the glacier’s water, she reflects:

That drink is like a kiss, a kiss that takes in the entire body of the other … like some wondrous omnipotent liquid tongue, touching our own tongues all over, the roofs and sides of our mouths, then moving in us and through to where it knows … I swallow, trying to make the spiritual, sexual sweetness of it last.

Continuing in the tradition of 50 Shades of Ice, the paper further cites Uzma Aslam Khan’s (2010) short story ‘Ice, Mating’. The story

explores religious, nationalistic, and colonial themes in Pakistan, while also featuring intense sexual symbolism of glaciers acting upon a landscape. Khan writes: ‘It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve seen them! I’ve even seen them fuck!’ (emphasis in original)

Icy conditions normally inhibit tumescence, but the paper’s four authors (two of them men, but writing through “the feminist lens”) seem to be in a state of sustained arousal. To them, even ice core drilling evokes coital imagery:

Structures of power and domination also stimulated the first large-scale ice core drilling projects – these archetypal masculinist projects to literally penetrate glaciers and extract for measurement and exploitation the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.

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Obama’s Libya Sh*t Show That pretty much sums up his foreign policy legacy. Jed Babbin

By on March 15th, 2016

Defining President Obama’s legacy isn’t hard. All you need to do is define the world’s situation before and after his presidency. One of the best examples is what used to be the nation of Libya, which Obama has reportedly called a “sh*t show.”

Before Obama’s military intervention, Libya was governed by Muammar Qaddafi, a dedicated terrorist. Ronald Reagan ordered a night attack by U.S. Air Force F-111s that nearly killed Qaddafi in response to a Berlin nightclub attack in 1986, but that didn’t stop Qaddafi. Qaddafi ordered the bombing of a U.S. airliner over Scotland in 1988 that killed 270.

Qaddafi was vulnerable and he was smart enough to know it. After President George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative led to the interception by U.S. and British forces of two ships in an Italian port carrying nuclear materials to Libya, and fearing the same fate as Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi surrendered his nuclear weapons development program.

All was relatively quiet in Libya. Qaddafi posed no danger to U.S. national security after that. And then came President Obama’s military intervention in Libya at the behest of France and other NATO allies that overthrew Qaddafi and led to his death in 2011.

The reason for the military action, Obama then claimed, was the danger of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by Qaddafi’s forces attacking civilians. The real reason was that France’s access to Libyan sweet crude was blocked by Qaddafi. Neither France nor England had the ability to undertake the airstrikes necessary to overthrow Qaddafi’s government, so U.S. forces were necessary despite the fact that no U.S. national security interest was at stake.

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U.S. Media Ignore Tel Aviv Shooter’s Plan to Attack Israeli Kindergartens

By on March 15th, 2016

The terrorist who shot and killed three Israelis in Tel Aviv on New Year’s Day hoped to slaughter Israeli kindergarten students, Israel Police reported Sunday.

Nashat Milhem indiscriminately fired a submachine gun killing two Israelis outside of a bar on a popular Tel Aviv street before running off. An hour later, the terrorist also killed a Bedouin taxi driver. After a week-long manhunt, Israeli forces killed Milhem following an exchange of fire near his home in northern Israel.

Two days after the attack, police uncovered Milhem’s plans to “carry out an attack on Tel Aviv kindergarten students.” However, the terrorist “felt he was being chased” and “focused on survival,” instead of going through with the plot to murder Israeli pre-schoolers.

Milhem’s attack was among those lauded in a Hamas video which aired Friday after the terrorist group hacked into Israel’s Channel 2 feed. “The year started in Tel Aviv and we have already returned to Dizengoff,” Hamas threatened, referencing the famous street in Tel Aviv where the terrorist attack took place.

“Terror will never end,” the video said, telling Israelis to “get out of our country.”

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A Time for Choosing: Socialism or Fascism By Cliff Kincaid

By on March 15th, 2016

Donald J. Trump has a strange and unhealthy fascination with the “strength” of those who pummel, terrorize, and kill people. At the Miami Republican debate, he stood by comments in support of the Communist Chinese dictatorship for killing protesters during a “riot,” and he praised the leading killer in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, for being “strong.” Despite these shocking assertions, Trump was seen by some in the media as turning in a respectable or even “presidential” performance. At least he didn’t talk about his body parts or use obscenities.

Once again, according to Trump’s leading media cheerleader, the Drudge Report, the New York businessman won the debate. Drudge said he got 63 percent in an online survey, versus 24 percent for Senator Ted Cruz.

It seemed bizarre to me. But in a matter-of-fact manner, moderator Jake Tapper noted that Trump has been criticized for “praising authoritarian dictators.” He quoted [1] Trump as saying about China’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it, then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

Despite the clear meaning of his words, Trump lamely replied, “That doesn’t mean I was endorsing that.” He added, “I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength. And then they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.”

Ohio Governor John Kasich had the Reaganite response. He said, “I think that the Chinese government butchered those kids. And when that guy stood in front—that young man stood in front of that tank, we ought to build a statue of him over here when he faced down the Chinese government.” He was referring to the famous picture of a pro-democracy demonstrator standing in front of a Chinese tank.

The estimates [2] of the dead in Tiananmen Square range from several hundred to more than 2,000.

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SYDNEY WILLIAMS- THOUGHT OF THE DAY

By on March 14th, 2016

I am a conservative who believes in government. Government is a requisite for a functioning, civil society, but it should be limited. It has responsibility for the safety of its citizens and it is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights. I revere the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They are the foundations on which our nation was built. I believe in property rights and the rule of law. Pertinent to today, I believe in the Electoral College, as an institution to help thwart the rise of demagogues. I believe in equality of opportunity, while understanding that outcomes will never be equal.

I believe that a job is critical to self-respect and that most jobs come from the private sector. Initiative, innovation and creativity are characteristics government should encourage. I believe fiscal prudence is necessary in government and I believe if we promise something we should be able to deliver it. I believe government has a responsibility for the aged, infirm, indigent and those unable to care for themselves. But I also believe that government is wrong when it crosses the Rubicon from providing help to those in need to exchanging favors for votes, which increases dependency at the cost of personal accountability.

I believe in the importance of family and the value of traditional marriage; though I respect those who have chosen different paths. I believe children are better off when raised in a two-parent household and that government should promote such family formations. It is hard for me to believe that life does not begin at conception, but I also understand that there can be mitigating circumstances warranting abortion – rare, one would hope, but including rape, incest and deformed fetuses. I believe government has a duty to provide a high school education for everyone, and that its responsibility is to students, not unions. I believe in civility, honor and mutual respect. I believe morality is absolute, not relative. For example, honor killings, sexual slavery and female genital mutilations, in any culture, are wrong. They have no place in civilized society and perpetrators should be punished. I believe religion is principally a matter between an individual and their God. I believe that God resides in each of us. Just as I will not force my religion on anyone else, I don’t want someone else’s forced on me.

I believe that equality before the law is fundamental to a fair and democratic society – that no one is above the law, no matter the political power they or their friends may have, nor the wealth they or their friends may possess. I recognize that we can never do away with cronyism – that from time immemorial some men and women have attached themselves to those with great wealth or who exert great power. But I also believe that our laws and courts should be vigilant against those who abuse their positions. I recognize that there are bad people in every profession and that hatred and racism are not the sole purview of one class, race, or political party, and that society has a responsibility to flush them out. I believe that ninety-nine percent of law enforcement personnel are good people doing a difficult and dangerous job and deserve our support.

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