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September 2022

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

News flash: There is no climate change emergency! By Paul S. Gardiner

By on September 10th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/news_flash_there_is_no_climate_change_emergency.html

There is no climate change emergency, human-caused or otherwise, according to over 1,100 objective, truth-seeking scientists and professionals from over 35 countries.  Many of the scientists are climatologists, environmental scientists, pollution meteorologists, and climate researchers who fully support the findings of the Global Climate Emergency Group (GCEG) in its recently released report, entitled “World Climate Declaration: There Is No Climate Emergency.” 

The significance of this report cannot be overstated.  It directly refutes the climate emergency claims of many of the world’s so-called “elites,” the World Economic Forum, elements of the United Nations, America’s Democrat party, and other promoters of climate change catastrophe.  Further, the findings of the report strongly negate efforts to do away with fossil fuels and charge full steam ahead to deploy electric vehicles as quickly as possible and spend many billions of dollars on near-term green energy projects, etc.

Dr. Michael Rectenwald, noted author and former professor at New York University, recently reported that various Democrats are pressuring the Biden administration to declare a climate emergency.  These people believe (or knowingly falsely state ) that failure to do so will result in excess carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions killing every living creature on Earth in just a few years.  For example, Representative Alan Lowenthal, a California Democrat, is quoted as saying, “We have a few years left, and that’s it.  The planet is dying.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Computer experts urge Georgia to replace voting machines

By on September 10th, 2022

https://www.aol.com/computer-experts-urge-georgia-replace-113517195-154148485.html

A group of computer and election security experts is urging Georgia election officials to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots [which were foolproof and what CA had] ahead of the November midterm elections, citing what they say are “serious threats” posed by an apparent breach of voting equipment in one county.

The 13 experts on Thursday sent a letter to the members of the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’s a non-voting member of the board. It urges them to immediately stop using the state’s [notorious, programmable] Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines. It also suggests they mandate a particular type of post-election audit on the outcome of all races on the ballot.

The experts who sent the letter include academics and former state election officials and are not associated with efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The midterm elections are just two months away. A switch to hand-marked paper ballots could easily be made by then [but will not] because state law already provides for them to be used as an emergency backup, the letter says.

State Election Board Chair William Duffey responded in an email to The Associated Press that the “security of our election equipment is of paramount interest to the State Election Board as is the integrity of the election process in Georgia.” He noted that the alleged breach in Coffee County is being investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and secretary of state’s office investigators and said the FBI [Hah!] has been asked to assist.

“The investigation is active and ongoing,” Duffey wrote. “Information developed will be considered to evaluate the impact of the Coffee County conduct.”

Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly said that Georgia’s elections remain secure because of varied security mechanisms in place. Spokesperson Mike Hassinger said in an email that the office will respond “in due time with due care” and that the response will be “addressed directly to the authors, rather than leaked to the media to obtain some sort of rhetorical advantage.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the Feds Coordinate With Facebook on Censorship Newly released emails show tech sites working with public officials, often solicitously.

By on September 10th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-feds-coordinate-with-facebook-twitter-white-house-social-media-emails-covid-instagram-11662761613?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

One nagging question in the social-media age is how online platforms like Facebook and Twitter choose to “moderate” speech—and why, and whether the government is leaning on them to step it up. Hundreds of pages of emails between federal officials and the big social sites were recently dropped in court, and they make for instructive, if not definitive, reading.

The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”

Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.

***

The trouble with seeing all of the correspondence, some of which dates to the Trump Administration, as inherently illegitimate is that much of it seems to involve actual misinformation. The White House flags the Instagram user anthonyfauciofficial, apparently someone posing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and asks: “Any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours.” The answer from Facebook (most of the names are redacted): “Yep, on it!”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Lessons of 9/11 Are Still Unlearned Our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives.Bruce Thornton

By on September 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lessons-of-9-11-are-still-unlearned/

Twenty-one years have passed since the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, and our foreign policy establishment and ruling elite still have not learned the lessons of that horrendous carnage. The Romans thought even fools could learn from experience, but our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives. As a consequence, our foreign policy and international relations continue to put our national security at risk.

This misinterpretation of modern Islam’s traditional resistance to infidel hegemony began with the Iranian Revolution, the first of subsequent jihadist attacks on the U.S. that culminated on 9/11. The West filtered that religious revolution through the old ideas of anticolonialism and national self-determination encoded in the Versailles settlement. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this stale received wisdom, blaming “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

This ahistorical orthodoxy had been explicitly rejected 30 years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the traditional Islamic universalist goals of the Iranian Revolution: “We shall export our revolution to the world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds throughout the world, there will be jihad.” Nor was Khomeini an outlier among Muslims. Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, similarly said that his designs for transforming Egypt into an Islamic state ruled by sharia law would be a “springboard for universal expansion ‘until the entire world will chant the name of the Prophet.’”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Laptop From Hell Explodes Onscreen in ‘My Son Hunter’ The movie conservatives have been waiting for is here. by Mark Tapson

By on September 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-movie-conservatives-have-been-waiting-for-is-here/

The movie that conservative audiences have been waiting for is here. And by that I don’t just mean that yesterday was the eagerly-anticipated premiere of My Son Hunter, the Robert Davi-directed dark comedy about Joe Biden’s wayward son and his laptop from hell. I mean that this is the political film that finally sets a new bar for conservative filmmaking, far above the heavy-handed messaging and awkward acting that right-leaning audiences have generally had to settle for in the recent past.

You have never seen a conservative film quite like this. Produced by Phelim McAleer and Anne McIlhenny (FrackNation, Gosnell, The Obamagate Movie) and written by screenwriter/novelist Brian Godawa (To End All Wars, The Obamagate Movie), My Son Hunter careens – like a drunken Hunter himself – from comedy to tragedy, from family drama to high-level political corruption, from moral brokenness to moral courage. Surprising stylistic quirks abound, including word balloons onscreen and characters breaking the “fourth wall” to address the audience directly. And yes, just like Hunter’s life, there is an almost nonstop parade of hookers, drugs, and shady deals – hence the R rating that sadly may discourage some conservative moviegoers (Movieguide gives My Son Hunter an “Excellent” rating but advises “extreme caution” due to “immoral carnal behavior, images of women in skimpy outfits, and strong foul language”). The Daily Mail reported overhearing one viewer at a private screening describing the film as “Not your mother’s conservative movie.”

The plot centers on Teflon Addict Hunter Biden, played by British actor Laurence Fox (Gosford Park, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Frankenstein Chronicles), and his terrified realization that the personal laptop he carelessly forgot to pick up from a repair shop could derail his father’s presidential campaign. A hooker who has captured Hunter’s heart offers to help him spin the publicity, but in order to do that, she needs to know all the potentially damaging material on that computer. As the sordid contents reveal the depth and breadth of Biden family corruption, the hooker comes to a slow political revelation.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

The intersectionality of antisemitism By Ruthie Blum

By on September 8th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-716691

Fiamma Nirenstein’s latest book, Jewish Lives Matter, paints an aptly bleak portrait of the way in which Jew-hatred has had a happy resurgence in the West under the guise of human rights.

The term, which represents a genuinely high value, is so abused by the people who earn their livelihoods promoting it through various progressive movements and heavily funded NGOs, as well as by many of the very groups it aims to protect that its original meaning is all but a hologram.

As Nirenstein adeptly illustrates, this inversion of good and evil was given a serious push by champions of the Palestinian cause, whose false claims against the Zionist enterprise provided the perfect cloak for any antisemitism that was dormant, or at least kept under wraps, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Indeed, while it was no longer acceptable to admit to a desire to annihilate the Jews, Israel became an acceptable target for what Natan Sharansky dubbed the three Ds: demonization, double standards and delegitimization.

“Today’s pro-Palestinian movements have found, especially in America, but also in France through the Islamic nexus, a conceptual link with the themes of racial injustice, colonial racism, and the persecution of blacks and women throughout history,” she writes. “Although Jews could only be identified by a very manipulative observer as the white oppressor or masculinist, this is precisely what has happened. The so-called intersectionality purportedly aimed at realizing human rights for all has become the catalyst for the current wave of antisemitism.”

THE TITLE of the book derives from this very phenomenon. Nirenstein, a prolific author, journalist and former member of the Italian Parliament, describes how the May 25, 2020 killing of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a sadistic Minneapolis police officer gave rise not only to riots on behalf of blacks in the United States but sparked an explosion of anti-Israel vitriol.

And this, she points out, was a full year before Operation Guardian of the Walls, Israel’s 11-day war against Hamas in Gaza, which would open the floodgates to Israel-bashing and open antisemitism on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Med School Misinformation Course Misinforms on Puberty Blockers, ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

By on September 8th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/med-school-misinformation-course-misinforms-on-puberty-blockers-gender-affirming-care/

A new class being offered at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine purports to teach the next generation of doctors how to dispel medical misinformation, but a recent article on the class suggests it may be doing the opposite.

The course, Improving Scientific Communication and Addressing Misinformation, was designed to teach “tomorrow’s health professionals how to tackle things in a way that reaches the public where they’re at,” Dr. Vineet Arora, a course instructor and the dean of medical education at the school, told the Chicago Tribune.

Sara Serritella, who co-teaches the class with Arora, said that they aim to level the playing field and “make it a fair fight” between experts and those who would propagate falsehoods about public and individual health.

But even in the Tribune‘s glowing profile of the course, the tension between this apparent mission and the real world consequences of overconfident “anti-misinformation” campaigns quickly becomes glaringly apparent.

As part of their coursework, students are tasked with creating an infographic that dispels medical myths, and one project cited approvingly by the newspaper tackled those surrounding “gender-affirming hormone care.”

According to the Tribune, the student “wrote in his infographic that use of puberty blockers — medication that can be used to temporarily suppress puberty in transgender and gender nonconforming children — can ‘give families time to explore their child’s gender and gather information without causing distress to the child’ that can sometimes be brought on by puberty. He wrote that, ‘If stopped, puberty will resume normally as the sex assigned at birth.’”

The problem is that almost all of the information described as being conveyed in the infographic is subject to vigorous scientific debate, and so doesn’t lend itself to the binary “misinformation” vs. “information” framework embedded in the curricula.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Interview: Christopher Leonard, Author of “The Lords of Easy Money” The Fed has “wrenched this gap between the very rich and everybody else, which is the defining economic dysfunction of our time.” Matt Taibbi

By on September 8th, 2022

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/interview-christopher-leonard-author

There’s an illuminating scene in Christopher Leonard’s The Lords of Easy Money that talks about the difficulty of trying to communicate the intricacies of Fed policy to mass audiences. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a trusted voice of the Tea Party movement and therefore someone who would have been expected to take an interest in the Fed’s plans for a massive intervention in the economy via the quantitative easing program, took on the subject in a free-flowing broadcast. Leonard describes what ensued:

Beck scrawled a long numeral on a chalkboard: 600,000,000,000. This represented the value of bonds the Fed just announced it would buy. “This is what they call quantitative easing,” Beck said. Then he walked to a new chalkboard with a confusing flowchart written across it that included a series of large, cartoonish arrows that seemed to signify the flow of money, or influence, or something like that, behind the Fed’s new program. Confusingly, the whole thing began with organized labor, depicted by a union boss wearing a bowler’s cap and with a cigar dangling from his mouth. It got weirder and increasingly inaccurate from there. The final cartoon on the flowchart showed a group of top-hat-wearing bankers…

Leonard described Beck’s understanding of the Fed as “like that of a very high drug user who had sat in a motel room, trying to eavesdrop through the wall while people talked about central banking.” I remember the broadcast – though I wasn’t a fan of Beck’s and occasionally wondered if his chalkboard theories about Obama as both Hitler and Stalin were really a brilliant parody I was too thick to grasp, I thought he was at least trying to say something critical about a truly dangerous Fed policy.

As Leonard notes, Beck got one important thing right, that the flood of cheap money punished ordinary savers, but the rest his presentation was so far-out, and over-focused on the idea that QE risked Weimar-style hyperinflation, that his audience probably ended up with a net minus from a knowledge perspective.

This was too bad, because the media treatments on the other, more “respectable” side, at 60 Minutes, CNBC, CNN, and the like, were either completely credulous in repeating the assertions of Fed officials that its policies were needed to “jumpstart the sluggish economy” or, if they were critical at all, focused only on the narrow question of price inflation. The much more serious question of the impact of Fed policies on asset prices simply didn’t fit well in our increasingly bifurcated media landscape, which didn’t know whether to identify the concerns of a figure like Leonard’s main character Thomas Hoenig as conservative or liberal complaints. In fact, Hoenig’s worries were about inherent institutional weaknesses that concerned both left and right demographics, making his story a tough sell to either media “side.” In this sense, a book like The Lords of Easy Money is a gift to media audiences that rarely get a clear look at a confounding topic.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

NYC’Trinity School Gets its Anti-Woke Comeuppance By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

By on September 8th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/life/trinity-school-gets-anti-woke-comeuppance-veritas/?utm_source=Spectator+

The Trinity School in New York City was founded in 1709 by William Huddleston to instruct the children of poor parishioners of Trinity Church, located at the top of Wall Street. The school ceased its affiliation with the Episcopal Church 1968, though it still has an Episcopal priest, salaried by the Church, to conduct its weekly chapel services. Trinity is the fifth oldest school in the United States and the oldest in New York in terms of continuous operation.

I myself was enrolled at Trinity in all twelve grades. I received a top-flight education at Trinity in the 1950s and ’60s from a superb faculty most of whom I recall with respect and in many cases real affection, as I do the school itself. Yet I have also disapproved of every change it has made since my departure decades ago, beginning with the trustees’ decision to take the place co-ed in 1971. The very strict and rigorous curriculum — five, six, and seven hours of homework nightly — gave me more than enough to occupy my mind without having the female element to contend with.

Several days ago, a man with whom I entered the first grade forwarded me a letter addressed to the “Dear Members of the Trinity School Community.” The letter below the salutation began, “Regrettably…” I have learned from long experience that the word is one that heads of institutions such as John Allman’s have frequent occasion to employ. And indeed, on this particular one, Mr. Allman had a very great deal to regret.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Green parties are facing a reality check Will environmentalists take note of what is happening to their counterparts in Germany? Douglas Murray

By on September 8th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/green-parties-facing-reality-check/

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the lights on today. That pleasant period for them came to a halt this year, when that old friend of conservatives — reality — kicked in.

When Vladimir Putin chose to invade Ukraine in February, one of the things that was finally brought to greater public attention was Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. In recent years countries such as Germany were very happy to rely on Russian gas for their energy needs. At the same time they were thrilled to be able to cover themselves in a green veneer by shutting down their nuclear and coal-fired power stations.

Four years ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, the then-president Donald Trump spoke about the dangers of such reliance. As he put it:

Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the western hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.

But the Germans, and everybody else, knew better.

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