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December 2017

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Feeding the Swamp: the Democrat Strategy for 2018 by Linda Goudsmit

By on December 10th, 2017

National Geographic teaches us that the growth and decay of swamp roots increase the accumulation of soil. The animals living in the swamp feed on fallen leaves and other material. The droppings of wildlife including animals, fish, and birds help fertilize the swamp. So it is in Washington – political animals, fish, birds, and plants living in a well-calibrated ecosystem dangerous to outsiders. President Trump has threatened the delicate balance of the established Washington swamp ecosystem and the swamp creatures are uniting to destroy him.

Swamp life and career politicians adapt to fluctuating water levels and weather conditions. Elections that destabilize the equilibrium are managed with absorption of the excess water and a return to the balance of nature that swamp life requires. President Trump has disrupted the status quo of political life in Washington and the establishment Democrat/Republican ecosystem is in total disarray and struggling to survive – they cannot resorb the water – they are desperate and determined to destroy the disruptor.

The current Mueller investigation is a joint effort of the Washington establishment to remove President Trump from office. Mueller’s “EPA” – Effort to Prove Anything – seeks to restore equilibrium to the corrupt political establishment. Political analyst Cliff Kincaid has written a superb article chronicling the troubling ascendance of Mueller.

Mueller, lauded as a non-partisan man of integrity by both Democrats and Republicans, has exposed himself as a primary swamp creature determined to destroy President Trump. So far Mueller’s “EPA investigation” into Russian meddling in the 2016 election has exonerated candidate Trump of any collusion and instead exposed secretary of state Hillary Clinton for actually colluding with the Russians to sell 20% of American uranium assets. No problem for swampster Mueller – in a move of stunning investigative overreach he simply expanded the scope of his witch hunt with a suspicious lack of opposition from Republicans. Currently the Mueller “EPA” is conducting an unauthorized, unrestricted, unlimited investigation into President Trump personally. Why?

It is always about the delicate balance of the ecosystem. President Trump promised America that he would grow the economy and drain the swamp to make America great again. Voters could finally see that career politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi, Obama, Bernie Sanders (the pretend socialist), Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell all came into office with very little and left as millionaires with full benefit packages guaranteed for life. Voters recognized that lawmakers were making laws that benefitted themselves at taxpayer expense. They could see the lives of the politicians improving but their own lives deteriorating. Voters were no longer satisfied with the established political ecosystem – they voted for change. They voted to drain the swamp.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Peter Smith The Joy of Righteous Madness

By on December 10th, 2017

Had I been born with the gullible gene found so often on the Left, life would be gloriously simple. I would believe, for example, that climate can be regulated by decree and punishing productive people promotes growth. Alas, a blissful immunity to history’s lessons is not my happy lot.

Saw a mad chap on Fox News who heads a group of people who want no national borders and one world government elected by, well, everyone. There will be fewer have-nots apparently. Without catching breath, he blamed the California bushfires on climate change.

There are, and have always been, I guess, eccentric people around with eccentric (unconventional and sightly strange) views. They usually do no harm and are best put up with. But what happens when large mobs take possession of eccentric views or, more correctly, when eccentric views take possession of large mobs. Nothing good is the answer. Effectively the inmates take over the asylum.

This is where we are now. Hordes of people in every land believe that we can control the climate. Hordes, particularly among those under thirty-five, believe that we can share the fruits of production much more equally. There is a large overlap.

I find it unnerving to be sane amid so many inmates. How do I know that I am sane? It’s simple really. I don’t have fanciful ideas about what mankind can control. It used to be called having one’s feet on the ground. So back to the asylum and, first, to economic equality

We know what happens when governments try to impose economic equality. People die in large numbers. Yet old ‘gurus’ devoid of sense — Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, for instance — are heroes among many young people for proposing at best immiseration and at worst gulags. Of course, it is dressed up as fairer shares but we know where it leads.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Washington Post: Where Conservatism Dies in Bitterness By Julie Kelly

By on December 10th, 2017

The Washington Post might want to roll out a new motto in 2018. Instead of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” perhaps the paper should try, “Conservatism Dies in Bitterness.”https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/08/washington-post-where-conservatism-dies-in-bitterness/

Since Donald Trump’s election, the Post has become an asylum—er, home—for conservative sore-losers who cannot get over the fact that Trump won the presidency over their erudite objections. One-time conservative heroes such as George Will and Kathleen Parker serve up red-meat rants against Trump to curry favor with the Post’s liberal readership. It’s a shrewd, if not cynical, tactic by columnists with waning influence to stay relevant in the age of Trump, and a calculated move by the paper to refute charges of bias by featuring allegedly conservative columnists.

But in its zeal to add another drummer to the paper’s anti-Trump conservative garage band, the Post has dug up some interesting characters. On Wednesday, the Post published a column by Jay Kaganoff, who urged his “fellow conservatives” to call on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign. Kaganoff wrote a solemn plea—complete with a scummy reference to Thomas’s alleged appetite for pornography—for “conservatives [to] seriously reconsider our continued support for Thomas in light of his past.”

Taking a cue from liberals who are now conveniently condemning Bill Clinton 20 years later, Kaganoff said this:

I believe Anita Hill. I believe that Clarence Thomas abused his authority to sexually harass a woman who worked for him. And lied about it. And smeared his accuser. As painful as it is to repudiate a man I respected, I believe Thomas should never have been confirmed and should resign.

So, who is this conservative crusader whose call to remove a sitting Supreme Court justice we real conservatives should heed? Kaganoff’s byline claims he has “written for National Review Online and Commentary Magazine, among others.” As a National Review Online contributor, I have never heard his name, nor read anything he has written. On Facebook, National Review publisher emeritus Jack Fowler wrote: “The guy who penned it claims an NR pedigree. Fact: He wrote for NR twice under a pseudonym. Maybe he thinks he’s Mark Twain.” Naturally, Commentary’s archive came up empty and a Google search of his name doesn’t produce much of anything. But despite his thin, questionable résumé, the Post gave Kaganoff 1,100-words worth of prime real estate on its op-ed pages to demand Thomas’s ouster. Why? To crib a famous line from “The Brady Bunch,” because he fit the suit.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

18 Questions CNN Needs To Answer After Getting Busted For Fake News Mollie Hemingway

By on December 10th, 2017

Early on Friday, CNN promoted its latest breathless report purporting to show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. CNN has been extremely invested in the narrative of collusion for the last year.

In June, CNN was forced to pull one of its Russia-Trump conspiracy stories that “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.” The discredited story was based on a single anonymous source who connected Anthony Scaramucci, a prominent ally of President Trump, to a Russian investment fund managed by a Kremlin-controlled bank. Three journalists who worked on the story were fired.

But many of the other stories CNN pushed had serious problems, including one that claimed fired FBI head Jim Comey would testify he never told President Trump three times that he was not under FBI investigation. That’s precisely what he testified the next morning after the story ran. Still other stories are headlined explosively and presented on-air breathlessly while being quite anodyne. Earlier this week, was a piece headlined, “Exclusive: Previously undisclosed emails show follow-up after Trump Tower meeting.” The piece quietly revealed that Trump Jr. didn’t receive the follow-up and the “follow-up” was in no way incriminating or suggesting treasonous collusion to steal an election. Such stories have been par for the course for the Russia-Trump collusion narrative.

Friday morning’s report — which got the usual suspects extremely excited — was one such story. Broadcast widely on air and online, it intimated that Donald Trump, Jr. was given an advance notice about documents hacked or phished from Democrats before they were publicly available. The story didn’t include any evidence that the random dude who emailed Trump, Jr. was correct, that his email had been opened, that he was connected to Russia, or anything else to justify the excitement that those all-in on the collusion narrative had in response to it.

But more than that, it turned out that CNN completely botched the story. Instead of advance notice that this random dude sent in to Trump affiliates, it was late notice that this random dude sent in. The Washington Post obtained the email and reported that CNN had completely messed up the story, claiming a September 4 date to an email that was actually sent on September 14, a day after the documents were publicly available.

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The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened by Glenn Greenwald

By on December 10th, 2017

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow to the Trump/Russia collusion story:

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone Part two

By on December 10th, 2017

I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines.

The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t. Teachers often lament summer learning loss: Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use. Of course, some college graduates use what they’ve learned and thus hold on to it—engineers and other quantitative types, for example, retain a lot of math. But when we measure what the average college graduate recalls years later, the results are discouraging, to say the least.
In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. The ignorance it revealed is mind-numbing. Fewer than a third of college graduates received a composite score of “proficient”—and about a fifth were at the “basic” or “below basic” level. You could blame the difficulty of the questions—until you read them. Plenty of college graduates couldn’t make sense of a table explaining how an employee’s annual health-insurance costs varied with income and family size, or summarize the work-experience requirements in a job ad, or even use a newspaper schedule to find when a television program ended. Tests of college graduates’ knowledge of history, civics, and science have had similarly dismal results.

Of course, college students aren’t supposed to just download facts; they’re supposed to learn how to think in real life. How do they fare on this count? The most focused study of education’s effect on applied reasoning, conducted by Harvard’s David Perkins in the mid-1980s, assessed students’ oral responses to questions designed to measure informal reasoning, such as “Would a proposed law in Massachusetts requiring a five-cent deposit on bottles and cans significantly reduce litter?” The benefit of college seemed to be zero: Fourth-year students did no better than first-year students.

Other evidence is equally discouraging. One researcher tested Arizona State University students’ ability to “apply statistical and methodological concepts to reasoning about everyday-life events.” In the researcher’s words:

Of the several hundred students tested, many of whom had taken more than six years of laboratory science … and advanced mathematics through calculus, almost none demonstrated even a semblance of acceptable methodological reasoning.

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The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone Students don’t seem to be getting much out of higher education. Bryan Caplan Part One

By on December 10th, 2017

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

How, you may ask, can anyone call higher education wasteful in an age when its financial payoff is greater than ever? The earnings premium for college graduates has rocketed to 73 percent—that is, those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 73 percent more than those who have only a high-school diploma, up from about 50 percent in the late 1970s. The key issue, however, isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions.

First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.

The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely complicates the puzzle. If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because, despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity.

Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel Carries Out Airstrikes on Hamas Following Fire From Gaza Strikes come amid heightened tensions in wake of U.S. Embassy decision

By on December 9th, 2017

TEL AVIV—Israel launched airstrikes early Saturday at Hamas positions in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, as tensions simmer between Palestinians and Israeli forces over a White House policy change on Jerusalem.

​The strikes overnight targeted two weapons-manufacturing sites, an arms warehouse and a military compound, the Israeli military said. Three people were killed in the strikes and more than 20 were injured, Gazan health authorities said, according to the Palestinian Authority’s state news agency. Hamas said two of the dead were members of its armed wing.

Israel was responding to rockets fired on Israeli communities on the border of the strip. One of the rockets fired from Gaza exploded in the Israeli town of Sderot on Friday night, causing damage to several parked cars, Israeli media reported.

Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, didn’t claim responsibility for the rocket fire directed at Israel. A number of small jihadist groups in Gaza instead said they were responsible for the rockets.

However, Hamas this week called for a Palestinian uprising against Israel after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and said he would plan to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv.

While exchanges of rockets and strikes aren’t uncommon between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the timing is sensitive because it comes during heightened tensions between the two sides. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars over the past 10 years, in part because both sides escalated fire from smaller exchanges. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Welcome to the Hell Hole that is Brussels by Drieu Godefridi

By on December 9th, 2017

Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale.

If you penetrate the thick cloud of professional indignation to scrutinize the reality of the “capital of Europe”, what you see in many respects is actually a hell hole, one where socialism, Islamism, riots and looting are the new normal.

When then-candidate Donald Trump noted in January 2016 that, thanks to mass immigration, Brussels was turning into a hell hole, Belgian and European politicians presented a united front at the (media) barricades: How dare he say such a thing? Brussels, capital of the European Union, the very quintessence of the post-modern world, the avant-garde of the coming new “global civilization,” a hell hole? Of course assimilating newcomers is not always easy, and there may be friction from time to time. But never mind, they said: Trump is a buffoon, and anyway, he has zero chance of getting elected. Such were the thoughts of those avid readers of The New York Times International Edition and regular watchers of CNN International.

However, Donald Trump, in his unmistakable, brash style, was quite simply right: Brussels is rapidly descending into chaos and anarchy. Exactly two months after that dramatic Trumpism, Brussels was eviscerated by a horrific Islamic terror attack that left 32 people dead. And that was only the tip of the monstrous iceberg that has built up over three decades of mass immigration and socialist madness.

Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale.

First, there was the qualification of the Moroccan team to the soccer World Cup: between 300 and 500 “youths” of foreign origin took to the streets of Brussels to “celebrate” the event in their own way, looting dozens of shops in the historical center of Brussels, wreaking havoc in the deserted avenues of the “capital of civilization” and, during their riot, injuring 22 police officers.

Three days later, a social media rap music star nicknamed “Vargasss 92,” who is a French citizen of foreign origin, decided to organize another unauthorized “celebration” in the center of Brussels, which quickly turned into another riot. Again, shops were destroyed and people assaulted for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Short clips of the event streamed onto the social networks, showing the world (and Belgians) the true face of Brussels without the politicians’ makeover. No wonder the European political elite hate social media from the depths of their hearts; they prefer the sanitized (and, in both France and francophone Belgium, heavily subsidized) traditional press.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Medical Journal Perpetrates the Noble Lie that American Air Quality Kills By John Dale Dunn and Steve Milloy

By on December 9th, 2017

The iconic academic journal of American medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), published since 1812, has committed itself to a Noble Lie[1], that ambient (natural) air quality in America kills hundreds of thousands annually.

Jeffrey Drazen, MD, lung specialist, Editor in Chief of the NEJM since 2000, Distinguished Parker B. Francis Professor of Medicine at the Harvard School of Medicine, professor in the Department of Environmental health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, is in his 17th year of tenure as editor of the NEJM and in that time he has approved publication of false claims about air quality lethality, resulting in the NEJM become a partisan news outlet that promotes the US EPA political agenda and onerous burdensome air regulations that chase a phantom air quality scare. Air quality in America isn’t killing anyone.

The bias and partisanship of the NEJM and Dr. Drazen and his editorial board is displayed in the publication of an article in June of 2017, authored by Di, Dominici, Schwartz, and others titled “Air Quality and Mortality in the Medicare Population” that claimed to show deaths from exposure to American air quality in a very large study of elderly Americans. They claimed thousands of elderly Americans were dying every year from bad air quality, but their study showed a very insignificant increase of 8% in deaths, in the range of what scientists call “noise” (natural variance) as opposed to good evidence, called “signal.” In spite of that unreliability, as described in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (Chapter on Epidemiology, pages 597-606), Dr. Drazen approved publication in the NEJM and joined in writing an editorial applauding the article ”Air Pollution Still Kills.”

Earlier in 2017, two published studies on air quality effects said just the opposite of the Di study, that ambient air quality wasn’t killing anybody. The first research report by James E. Enstrom was a reanalysis of old studies relied on by the EPA in the 1990’s to justify air regulations. The second study was by Young, Smith and Lopiano, a comprehensive decade long study of all the heavily populated air basins in California that showed no death effect from small particle or ozone air quality. These two studies refuted the premise and claims of the Di NEJM study of June 2017 and all the EPA funded and sponsored studies used to justify aggressive air quality regulations.

In legitimate science activity, researchers are expected to comment on studies that conflict or contradict their assertions, but the Di, Dominici, Schwartz article did not comment on or discuss the Enstrom and Young studies, or other studies that showed no death effect. The editors of the NEJM would be expected to demand that authors display a proper scientific temperament and cite contradictory studies and attempt to explain or refute the contradictions. Instead the Di authors and the editors of NEJM ignored the conflicts in results, and asserted their position. That’s how the Noble Lie is perpetrated; establishment researchers repeat themselves and assert the matter is settled.

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