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April 2019

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Four Corners‘ March-Hare Climatology

By on April 11th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/four-corners

he ABC has jumped yet again through the climate alarmists’ looking glass.

The recent Four Corners episode on global warming, Climate of Change, reminded me of physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He described a paper as so bad “it was not even wrong.” The ABC’s presenter was Stephanie March, a veteran ABC reporter and foreign correspondent in India and North America. I’ll first discuss the background of March’s main guest on the program, Dr Bill Hare, then run through some of the Four Corners content.

Dr Hare scored ten appearances — 620 words out of the 8100 — during 45 minutes, plus the final words on the episode. So who’s Dr Bill Hare? Just “the best climate lobbyist in the world”, as cited by Murdoch University.

For starters, and unmentioned by Four Corners, his main 16-year career (1992-2008) was as climate policy director and spokesman for Greenpeace International. To the Greenpeace fanatics, he was a “legend” in global climate politics,[1] penning fiery Greenpeace polemics such as warning the top 100 US companies to reject President Bush’s climate policies within a week or “face the consequences” globally. He also accused Australia of behaving like “an international selfish brat”. In 2002, he helped Greenpeace and similar groups start the Exxon Secrets website, described as “a chronicle of ExxonMobil’s efforts to corrupt the debate on global warming.” Greenpeace managed to dredge up $US30.9 million in donations by the company to alleged sceptic groups over 16 years, i.e. $US2m a year. The renewables industry currently involves investments of $US1.5 trillion a year.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Child Soldiers on the Streets of Paris It’s wrong to use kids as political puppets. Theodore Dalrymple

By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/children-as-political-puppets

On a pleasant spring evening, at about 7:00, I was walking back to my flat in Paris when I heard the sound of chanting and tambourines being struck in unison. Some of the chanting was unmistakably that of young children, though it was mixed with that of adults.

It came from a political demonstration against a law proposed by the Minister of Education. The proposed law sounded mostly uncontroversial: the age at which children must go to school was to be lowered to three years, but since nearly 97 percent of them do so anyway, this hardly represented a vastly increased burden on the education system. Other proposed changes also sounded less than earth-shattering, though they seemed to be directed toward reducing the influence of teachers’ unions in an extremely centralized system.

Children as young as six and eight held up placards saying that they demanded schools in which there was freedom of thought or that commercialism should be kept out of education. Children are precocious these days, but are they really able, at age six or eight, to argue for freedom of thought or against the entry of market forces into education?

A teacher handed me a flyer that said, “To put an end to this proposed law, parents and school staff are organizing to lead the combat.” No mention was made of the children, who made up half the crowd. I wanted to ask the teacher whether she thought it right to use children in this way: to make them shout slogans and wave banners. They do this kind of thing in North Korea—but in France?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Of Ilhan Omar, Anti-Semitism, and America By Sebastian Gorka

By on April 11th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/of-ilhan-omar-anti-semitism-and-america/

It was only a matter of time. And in this case, it didn’t take long at all.

After Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made her racist remarks about the “evil” and “hypnotic” influence of Israel, the undue influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington, (“it’s all about the Benjamins”), and the dual loyalty of American Jews, Democrats were on track to censure her by name from the floor of the House. But it never happened. Nancy Pelosi proved too weak.

After almost a week of wrangling, the committee that drafted the final statement on the scandalous freshman representative released a final text that never mentioned her by name, her statements, or any need for her to apologize for her bigotry. (Not coincidentally, Omar sits on this very committee.) In fact, the final language was such generic and anodyne boilerplate that it could have been issued at any time, by either party, for any reason or no reason at all.

That the Speaker of the House was so timid in the face of such shocking behavior should surprise no one.

Behold the face of the Democratic Party: minority, young, and racist. This is the fruit of identity politics. Be it Omar, who is on the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) who signaled the need to obliterate Israel on her first day in office, or the leader of the pack, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), a proud supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, the “new faces” of the DNC constitute a united front in their hatred for our Semitic brethren.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will William Barr Get Justice for Carter Page? By Julie Kelly

By on April 11th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/will-william-barr-get-justice-for-carter-page/

It all started with Carter Page. The biggest scandal in the history of American politics originated with carefully cultivated public suspicions about whether Page, a Naval Academy graduate and campaign volunteer, was a conduit between Team Trump and the Kremlin.

In spring 2016, Page emerged as the first alleged culprit in the nascent Trump-Russia collusion plotline. Bogus allegations about him were included in the infamous Steele dossier; he was the subject of relentless media coverage and public harassment; the FBI enlisted an informant to gather information on him in secret; and his own government accused him of being a Russian agent as it wiretapped him for a year under false pretenses.

Now it appears Attorney General William Barr finally will get to the bottom of why Page first became the target of Trump foes on the Right, then ultimately, of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration. This comes two years to the day since the Washington Post first published illegally leaked details about the FISA warrant on Page, which was obtained by James Comey’s FBI in October 2016.

Barr is poised to hold Page’s antagonists accountable. “The office of the inspector general has a pending investigation into the FISA process in the Russia investigation,” Barr told the House Appropriations committee on Tuesday.

When asked specifically whether the Justice Department also was investigating who illegally disclosed the existence of Page’s FISA warrant, Barr indicated he would await the criminal referrals expected to come this week from Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) regarding the same matter.

Further, Barr has acknowledged that he believes the Trump campaign was spied on in 2016. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. Yes, I think spying did occur,” Barr told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Page was one of a handful of Trump associates also pursued by an FBI informant during the campaign.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California Has Become America’s Cannibal State By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 11th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/california-has-become-americas-cannibal-state/

For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.

The state legislature sold that confiscatory tax rate on the idea that it was a temporary fix and would eventually be phased out. No one believed that. California voters, about 40 percent of whom pay no state income taxes, naturally approved the extension of the high rate by an overwhelming margin.

California recently raised gas taxes by 40 percent and now has the second-highest gas taxes in the United States.

California has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but its state sales tax of 7.3 percent is America’s highest. As of April 1, California is now applying that high state sales tax to goods that residents buy online from out-of-state sellers.

In late 2017, the federal government capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000. For high earners in California, the change effectively almost doubled their state and local taxes.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Christchurch, “Jewish Blame,” and the Global Scourge of Muslim Jew-Hatred Andrew Bostom

By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/christchurch-jewish-blame-and-the-global-scourge-of-muslim-jew-hatred_2847735.html

Brenton Tarrant committed a heinous, cowardly act of mass murder when he gunned down 50 defenseless Muslims at two Christchurch, New Zealand, area mosques on March 15, 2019.

As revealed in his own alleged manifesto, Tarrant’s ideological paradigm is a bigoted ethno-nationalist, Marxist-Leninist communist state—i.e., the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—“the nation with the closest political and social values to my [Tarrant’s] own.”

The PRC’s brutal behavior on a grand scale—forcibly interning and “re-educating” an estimated 1.5 million Xinjiang province Uyghur Muslims—comports neatly with Tarrant’s ideologically driven violence.

Tarrant alone bears ultimate responsibility for the carnage he wrought. Moreover, predictably hysterical claims by the Jew-hating Turkish President Erdogan—echoed by supposedly more staid Muslim organizations, “expert” media commentators, and “academics”—that Tarrant somehow represents systemic Western Islamophobia, grotesquely distort the global context of both Muslim versus non-Muslim (especially Christian) and internecine Muslim violence.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

3 Muslim Terror Plots Targeted US Synagogues in 3 Months American Jews have no idea that they might have been killed this year. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273412/3-muslim-terror-plots-targeted-us-synagogues-3-daniel-greenfield

On Wednesday, April 3, FBI agents converged on a Bozeman shooting range and took Fabjan Alameti into custody.

Alemati, an Albanian Muslim, had traveled from New York to Montana. “When the time will come for us to hunt them down, I will stand over them while I piece their bodies with hollow tips,” the Islamic terrorist had boasted in February. “Inshallah, we take as many kuffars (non-Muslims) with us.”

He had told a government informant back in January that his potential targets included military and government targets, as well as a “Jewish temple”.

Alameti’s terror plot back in January was the second such Islamic terror plot that month.

On December 14, 2018, Hasher Jallal Taheb was discussing some of the targets he had scouted in Washington D.C. They included the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and a specific synagogue.

In the middle of January, Taheb was arrested over in Georgia.

Taheb and Alemati had a number of similarities. Both men were twenty-one years old. Their terror plots were violent but scattershot. The range began with government building and ended with a synagogue.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Campus Radicalism Spirals Out of Control Academic-Industrial-Complex moves deeper into Brown-Shirt state. April 11, 2019 Jack Kerwick

By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273389/campus-radicalism-spirals-out-control-jack-kerwick

Just when the unprejudiced observer thought that it was impossible, the world of “Higher Education,” or what I not so affectionately refer to as “the Academic-Industrial-Complex,” continues to move ever-further leftward.

At George Mason University, the institution at which Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh holds a post as a Visiting Law Professor, students are up in arms.

The newly confirmed Justice had just signed a three-year contract with GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Kavanaugh is scheduled to co-teach this summer with Jennifer Mascot, his former clerk, a class in England. Yet some students—approximately 2,000 who signed a petition that they have labeled, “Mason 4 Survivors”—are having none of it, demanding that GMU administrators promptly terminate Kavanaugh’s employment and “void ALL contracts and affiliation” with him.

Unsurprisingly, this recently formed student group has made other demands, including demands for the creation of the position of a round-the-clock, on-campus “Sexual Assault Coordinator” and a formal apology issued by GMU administrators for hiring Kavanaugh in the first place.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu Wins Defense of the Jewish homeland is the voters’ paramount concern. Joseph Klein

By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273444/netanyahu-wins-joseph-klein

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have secured enough votes for his conservative Likud party to form a right-wing, ultra-orthodox coalition government. Based on vote totals calculated the morning after Tuesday’s vote, the Likud party itself tallied 26.27% of the vote, which translates to 35 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Along with five supportive right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties that amassed enough votes collectively to secure about 30 seats amongst them, Prime Minister Netanyahu is eyeing a 65-seat governing majority. Likud’s main challenger, the Blue and White party, led by the former chief of the Israel Defense Forces Benny Gantz along with former finance minister Yair Lapid, came in a close second with 25.94% of the vote. Although the Blue and White party’s vote total appears enough to also entitle it to 35 seats in the Knesset, it is nowhere near being able to reach the magic majority number of 61 seats with eligible coalition partners. Thus, barring some unforeseen occurrence, Prime Minister Netanyahu is on his way to commencing a record-setting fifth term, albeit under the cloud of possible indictment on bribery and other corruption charges.  

President Trump wasted no time in congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu for his victory. “He’s been a great ally and he’s a friend, I’d like to congratulate Bibi Netanyahu, that was a well-thought out race I can tell you,” President Trump said on Wednesday.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Amherst College’s Glossary of ‘Wokeness’ By Madeleine Kearns

By on April 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/amherst-colleges-glossary-of-wokeness/

Campus politics are increasingly deranged, and college administrators have a lot to answer for.

When Samuel Abrams, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, surveyed national data on the political views of college administrators, he revealed that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts at a ratio of twelve-to-one, and suggested (oh so gently) in a New York Times op-ed that this kind of imbalance might be a problem for “the free and open exchange of ideas.”

As detailed here by yours truly and here by National Review’s David French, Abrams was then treated appallingly by Sarah Lawrence College’s students and staff.

Abrams’s basic point – that students arrive on campus fairly liberal and are taught by very liberal professors and socialized by extremely liberal administrators – should concern anyone who cares about the integrity of higher education.

Last month a document produced by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Resource Center Team at Amherst College in Massachusetts, titled “Common Language Guide,” surfaced. The document was described by its authors as a “list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms.”

And what did they come up with? A slew of rather obscure definitions of oppressive behaviors and structures such as “eurocentrism,” “heterosexism,” “ethnosexism,” “cissexism,” as well as more heard-of terms such as “ageism,” “classism,” and “racism.”

“Microaggressions,” the document explained, are “rooted in institutional oppression” and involve “verbal and nonverbal indignities and denigrating messages targeting people of historically and presently marginalized backgrounds.” This translates as insults, both accidental and deliberate. (Insults and slights are unpleasant, but are they really so ideologically loaded? Might this be encouraging people to be overly sensitive?)

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