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Ruth King

Questioning ‘the Science’ on Climate Change Robert Murray

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/05/questioning-the-science-on-climate-change/

What is it about “climate change” that makes it so different from every other issue? It divides families, friendships and political parties, it has brought about media and campus censorship and classroom propaganda. Minds close over, spooked. To question any aspect is the eighth deadly sin. “Deniers” are sub-human.

About anything else, research that suggests that a looming catastrophe might not be as bad as at first predicted would be welcome news indeed. Some of the issues in question are highly technical, but most are not that difficult.

This is a layman’s attempt—not even particularly sceptical—to explain them and suggest a way ahead. The nub of it is the long-term impact of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are respectable scientific arguments about it, as with many a complex problem, but politics, misconceptions and side issues are more and more clouding things over.

The “official” science comes from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main criticism is that it over-estimates future global warming—an argument easy to state but technical in detail and now smothered in irrelevance. In other words, some experts think “the science” is wrong.

So far, after thirty years of operation, the global warming the IPCC has predicted has been at the lower end of the “scenarios” of its mathematical modelling. There are respectable arguments—as there have been from the start—that the IPCC’s theories do not work out in practice.

The IPCC is effectively a global climate science monopoly, with unique power to estimate long-term climate trends and ways to mitigate them, such as the Paris Accords. It has access to a budget of billions, while sceptical scientists have barely peanuts for research and publicity. In Australia they are volunteers.

Trumpets and Tank Engines: A Turning Point in Gaza? by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17372/turning-point-in-gaza

Hamas is no match for the IDF and could be quickly and much more cheaply defeated by blunt and crushing military force were it not for one thing — the Israeli need to minimise loss of civilian life. Hamas know that.

Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world’s media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel’s callous and uncaring way of war. This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and “useful idiots” in the West…. Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same.

The wilful ignorance combined with malice has always been breathtaking. Every commission of inquiry determined Israel’s guilt before it even met for the first time.

Every debate and vote has overwhelmingly and of course falsely affirmed Israel’s supposed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile Hamas’s actual multiple war crimes have been brushed aside.

[T]he IDF did all they could to ensure minimum loss of civilian life by selecting targets where the lowest levels of innocents would be harmed…. As in previous conflicts in Gaza the IDF has made radio broadcasts in Arabic, sent SMS messages and even phoned civilians inside the strip to warn them of impending strikes….Gazans have given interviews confirming this.

Many in the media, human rights groups and international bodies have rushed to characterise all civilian casualties (other than those inflicted by Hamas of course) as war crimes. But the Geneva Conventions disagree. Inflicting civilian casualties is not illegal provided a military operation is necessary for the prosecution of a war, they are not disproportionate to the planned military gain and that combatant commanders do not intentionally target civilians while doing all they can to avoid hitting them.

The media takes reports from the Gaza health ministry as authoritative and objective. That is disingenuous and they know it. The health ministry is controlled by Hamas and follows their every order.

Despite all of this, as the media unceasingly show us, the real victims in this campaign have indeed been Gaza civilians. But they usually get the cause wrong. Every one is due to Hamas’s unprovoked aggression against Israel. None would have occurred without it.

If Western governments, international bodies and human rights groups are genuinely interested in avoiding suffering in Gaza, they should start now, striving to end Hamas’s reign of terror rather than support it by parroting their baleful narrative.

During an operation in Gaza last week, the Israel Defence Forces attacked a Hamas tunnel complex with 12 squadrons of 160 combat planes striking over 150 targets with hundreds of bunker-busting JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] in less than an hour. Although the battle damage assessment is still underway, the raid destroyed perhaps the most critical element of Hamas infrastructure, wiping out vast stocks of munitions and likely killing dozens if not hundreds of fighters. This was a hammer blow to Hamas and may prove to be a turning point in the conflict. It also sent a powerful message to Iran and Hizballah, foretelling the consequences of an assault on Israel with their arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon.

The Great Reject By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/05/13/the-great-reject-n1446584

We know from Klaus Schwab, Chair of the World Economic Forum that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, and architect of the Great Reset which envisions the entire re-making of Western society into a globalist oligopoly, that the pandemic is largely a manufactured crisis. COVID-19 is not “an existential threat,” he writes in COVID-19: The Great Reset; in fact, it is “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced in the last 2000 years.” Strategic chicanery has become the order of the day. According to Schwab, the COVID crisis must be weaponized to deceive and suppress a credulous population and to stifle dissent in order to bring about the total restructuring of Western societies. COVID is the stalking horse behind which the true purpose of the revolutionary scheme and prospectus advances.

World governments and public health organizations have complied with the Davos agenda, mobilizing a veritable arsenal of tactical ordnance in the service of the larger plan. The disease constitutes “our defining moment,” Schwab exults, as the world’s political and medical peerage prepared to launch a four-pronged attack on the free-market West: mask mandates, perpetual lockdowns, defective PCR testing protocols and controversial if not toxic vaccines. Almost everything government officials and public health authorities have stipulated and enforced has been engineered to create an unprecedented catastrophe.

Entire populations will be demoralized and deprived of agency, the entrepreneurial and self-employed middle class will be effectively phased out, and the ethos of individuality and self-reliance will succumb to a global collectivity. “You will own nothing and be happy” is the operative watchword. Only the political, technocratic and plutocratic elite will be spared, as Patrick Wood explains in Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation. This in a nutshell is the Great Reset. It sounds like a conspiracy theory aching to be debunked—the BBC’s considers the Reset as a laudable plan to restore the world’s economy rather than a “baseless conspiracy…which claims a group of world leaders orchestrated the pandemic to take control of the global economy.” The BBC perspective, among similar take-down efforts by many other Leftist venues, is wholly predictable. But a reading of Schwab’s various books detailing the project, in particular COVID-19: The Great Reset and Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the complicity of major international players like Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson, Al Gore, Prince Charles, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and a host of others, as well as the backing of Time Magazine, Greenpeace International, BP, etc., make it abundantly clear that an insurrectionary program is afoot.

Why AOC’s Disgusting Slanderous Attack Against Israel Falls Apart By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/15/israeli-arab-refutes-aocs-claim-that-israel-is-an-apartheid-state-n1447260

On Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other members of her “Squad” endorsed the claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” and therefore is not a democracy. An Arab-Israeli activist who served in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) defended his homeland from her slanderous claim. Many Americans on the Left have taken the Palestinian side in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, due in part to this argument.

“Apartheid states aren’t democracies,” AOC tweeted on Saturday, with Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) echoing her words. AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) shared videos of MSNBC host Ali Velshi’s monologue arguing that Israel is an apartheid state.

“Palestinians are at best, third class citizens in the nation of their birth. The idea that it is even remotely controversial to call what Israel has imposed on Palestinians as apartheid is laughable,” Velshi argued.

Yoseph Haddad, an Arab who actually lives in Israel, powerfully countered AOC’s claim.

“I’m Yoseph, an Israeli Arab. I checked the definition of apartheid and you seem to be confused by the propaganda of this political org,” Haddad tweeted. “Arabs like me have full equal rights and live, learn, work, and play together. Take it from me, I live it. Stop lying.”

Speaking on Israel’s I-24 News, Haddad explained that Israel is a multi-racial society

“Here you will see Israeli Jews and Arab Christians and Arab Muslims and Druze and all kinds of minorities. Here they shop together, work together, go to school together, make art together, save lives together, report the news together, serve in the army together, protest the government together, even work as lawyers and judges in the courts together,” he said.

House GOP Members Want Answers on January 6 Probe By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/14/house-gop-members-want-answers-on-january-6-probe/

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Representatives Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) asked for information about the Justice Department’s abusive investigation into January 6.

“Those that damaged property and assaulted police officers on January 6th should rightfully face justice,” the pair wrote in a letter sent May 14. “However, the public outcry and hyper-politicization of the events on January 6th may incentivize prosecutors to use overly aggressive tactics, overcharge, and abuse the power of the federal government in order to satisfy favored political groups.”

Roy and Massie asked Garland to schedule a briefing with Congress before the end of the month to address several concerns, including how plea deals are arranged, the FBI’s use of force in raiding the homes of nonviolent protesteors, and the Justice Department’s request to hold defendants behind bars pending trial. “[C]ongressional oversight of these prosecutions is essential as a check and balance on that power.”

House Republicans finally are pushing back on the Democrats’ largely fabricated narrative about what happened on January 6. Several GOP congressmen confronted ex-Trump officials in a House hearing on Wednesday, demanding answers on the killing of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed veteran shot by a still-unidentified Capitol Police officer, and all the “outright propaganda and lies,” as Representative. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said, peddled by Democrats and the news media.

Gosar also called for the release of the surveillance video captured by the Capitol Police’s security system on January 6. The USCP and Joe Biden’s Justice Department are fighting to keep those recordings under seal even from defense attorneys.

In a lengthy speech on the House floor Friday afternoon, Representative. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) expressed his outrage over the Capitol breach investigation; he cited numerous articles from American Greatness detailing how defendants are being treated and how political protest is being criminalized by Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

The Way of Socialism An absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination. By Roger Kimball *****

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/15/the-way-of-socialism/

Anyone who doubts that those in charge of the operation of Providence have a sly sense of humor needs only to ponder the sweet declarations emitted by our more pampered celebrities on the subject of socialism. I remember, for example, when the actor Jim Carrey told Bill Maher that “we have to say yes to socialism—to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.”

What a card! Were socialism to be instituted in the United States, one of the first things that would happen is that people like Jim Carrey—with an estimated net worth of $180 million—would be instantly pauperized. For what are the two fundamental pillars of socialism? The abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. And the cherry on top of this fudge sundae is that Jim Carrey actually starred in a movie called Dumb and Dumber, which is about “two unintelligent but well-meaning friends from Providence, Rhode Island.” Talk about art imitating life.

Let’s leave the latest incarnation of really-existing socialism—the country of Venezuela—to one side. That is a laboratory demonstration of what happens when you take a prosperous country and rigorously impose socialist policies on it. Jeremy Corbyn was partly right when he said the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez showed there was “another way” of doing politics and “it’s called socialism.”

Corbyn forgot to add: that way leads to universal immiseration and societal collapse, which is exactly what is happening in the once-rich South American country now. 

Is Joe Biden on the cusp of doing to us what Chavez did to Venezuela? To be frank, I do not think the American people will let him. But in the House of Fiscal Misery there are many mansions, and so far the actions of the Biden Administration have not been encouraging, as anyone who can pronounce the words “inflation,” “consumer confidence,” “energy prices,” or “taxes” knows full well. 

Biden and Iran: Temptation to Save the Zombie by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17371/biden-iran-temptation

[S]ensing that the American side is keen on producing the fudge, the Iranian side is raising the stakes.

On Monday “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei said that “liberating Palestine” is the “number one goal of the Islamic ummah”, making it clear that even if the “nuclear deal” is revived, the clash of two visions on the future of the Middle East will not come to a close.

The Iranian side is also trying to have over 1,000 sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic for issues not related to the “nuclear deal” lifted without offering any concessions in return.

Rouhani’s spokesman dropped another bombshell: whatever deal is made by officials representing the formal government of Iran in Vienna would have to be approved by “higher-up” in Tehran. In other words Khamenei would have a veto that he could exercise anytime he deems propitious.

Once the sham election is over [Khamenei] could revert to the “retreat-then-cheat” tactic that he describes as “heroic flexibility”. The tactic has been used in numerous cases besides the hare-brained scheme concocted by former President Barack Obama, including a variety of deals Tehran made with the European Union, China and Russia.

Today, none of those factors [of 40 years ago] are in play. The Cold War has ended, Iran has been knocked out of the oil market and Arabs are moving towards normalization with Israel for reasons of their own.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif estimates that the zombie regime in Tehran needs a minimum of $60 billion a year to stay erect and do the mischief it needs to do to survive.

The Vienna talks may end up providing the extra cash Tehran needs to stay in the game. The question Biden needs to ask is this: would such an outcome serve the interests of the US, not to mention that of the Iranian people, who are now thirsty for a change of direction?

Judging by what Iranian and US diplomats involved in the current talks to revive the moribund “nuclear deal” say, the widow of opportunity opened by Joe Biden’s victory in last year’s presidential election is likely to shut within the next few weeks.

Math Is racist and 2+2 = 4 is just a ‘trope’ By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/math_is_racist_and_22__4_is_just_a_trope.html

“2+2 does not equal five. Nor do two wrongs make a right.”

Laurie Rubel, a professor of math education at New York’s Brooklyn College, does not appear to be fond of the discipline she teaches. In fact, she apparently believes math is inherently racist. She recently tweeted, “the idea that math (or data) is culturally neutral or in any way objective is a MYTH.” In a separate tweet she noted that math “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy” after stating, albeit incoherently, “along with the ‘of course math is neutral because 2 + 2 = 4 trope’ are the related (and creepy) ‘math is pure’ and ‘protect math.’” Appearing drunk on her own peerless wokeness, she added, “I’d rather think on nurturing people & protecting the planet (with math in service of them goals).” Well, maybe just drunk.

What an amazing social justice warrior! What a flawless person! She’d rather “think on” nurturing people! And protecting the planet! Not that she’d actually do anything in furtherance of her stated goals. It is enough that she has stated them. And she wants to take that racist (and no doubt misogynistic, homophobic, and Islamophobic) math and use it “in service of them goals.” It’s a good thing she isn’t an English teacher. Though, to be fair, Ms. Rubel may believe English is at least as racist as math is. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be a better instructor.  Or Barney Rubble.

Seemingly every week another professor claims math, data, facts, good behavior, competence, proper hygiene, discipline, a work ethic, speaking ability, or another such basic building block of a successful society is prima facie evidence of the white supremacist patriarchy’s evil and unwarranted hold on American society. (How racist is that?) Yet, Rubel’s assertion that 2+2=4 is a “trope” still boggles the mind.

Iran: Election, or Referendum? By Hamid Enayat

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/iran_election_or_referendum.html

Iranian society is enduring hardships on many fronts under the reign of the mullahs.

The spectrum is quite broad, including domestic, regional, and international matters, economic challenges for its citizens, and ethnic and religious inequalities. In all of these areas, the regime’s report card reflects an atmosphere of disappointment and frustration.

In this respect (according to the Iranian calendar year), the Year 1400 presidential election (to be held June 18) is being held during the most unprecedented public despair. There is even a boycott of public participation in the election compared with other elections in the last forty years of the Islamic Republic.

In an interview with Le Monde, Faezeh Rafsanjani, Hashemi Rafsanjani’s daughter, and a dissident, called for a boycott of this election.

The unprecedented antagonism between the ordinary people and the government has intensified. 

This presidential election should be evaluated from different angles. The accumulation of public discontent, people’s total distrust regarding the regime’s economic plans, the destruction of the middle classes and lower strata of society, as well as the weakness and crisis of the legitimacy for the Supreme Leader, leads the society closer to a revolt. It is now a while that the slogan “My vote, NO Islamic Republic but YES to the Democratic Republic” has been shared widely on different social media platforms. In a way, this presidential election could be considered a referendum for the regime in Tehran.

After De Blasio Says Subways Safe, 4 Slashed on Subway Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/after-de-blasio-says-subways-safe-4-slashed-subway-daniel-greenfield/

You can set your clock by what New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio says as long as you want to be late everywhere and to everything.

“What’s happening right now is clearly at the instruction of the governor, MTA leadership is fearmongering,” de Blasio said in an interview Friday. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’ve ridden the subways. So many folks in my life ride the subways all the time. They’re overwhelmingly safe,” the mayor said, adding that “there have been some incidents that truly are troubling.”

Here’s the latest “troubling incident”.

A group of men who are believed to have attacked at least four different people – slashing three of them – during a 12-minute violence spree on Friday morning

The first of Friday’s incidents was reported around 4:25 a.m., when a 44-year-old man riding a southbound No. 4 train was approached by two men, one of whom slashed him in the face, police said. The victim got off the subway at Manhattan’s Union Square Station.