Displaying the most recent of 90914 posts written by

Ruth King

Bring the Global Climate Action Summit Back to Earth By Tom Harris and Dr. Jay Lehr

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bring-the-global-climate-action-summit-back-to-earth/

If there was ever a time when a realistic counter to the climate scare was desperately needed, it was last month in San Francisco. Thousands of climate catastrophists invaded the city to attend the September 12-14 Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS), a massive event designed to drum up support for the Paris Agreement on climate change and to push the world to quickly end our use of fossil fuels.

In his video promoting the Summit, California Governor Jerry Brown said:

It’s up to you and it’s up to me, and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change.

Let us be clear: Brown and his cohorts are not talking about “carbon.” They are talking about carbon dioxide (CO2) which is the opposite of pollution. Indeed, all vegetation thrives on CO2. But that honesty would not conjure up dark thoughts of soot, coal dust, and lamp black.

The “carbon” misnomer appears everywhere in climate change pronouncements. The Summit website even claimed “decarbonization of the global economy is in sight.”

Decarbonization actually means phasing out the fossil fuels that now provide over 80% of all the energy we use in favor of wind, solar, and other supposedly clean energy sources (which cannot conceivably power the world).

To contest the Summit, the Heartland Institute — labeled by The Economist magazine as “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change” — livestreamed two panel discussions of scientists and climate policy experts meeting at the conference center of The Independent Institute in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco.

Chaired by Heartland senior fellow James Taylor, the panel participants included Dr. Jay Lehr, Heartland’s science director; Dr. Terry L. Gannon of The Independent Institute; Dr. Richard Keen, meteorology instructor (emeritus), University of Colorado, Boulder; Miami, Florida-based hurricane meteorologist Stanley Goldenberg; and Tom Harris, Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s Social Experiments Are Wreaking Havoc on America Today By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obamas-social-experiments-are-wreaking-havoc-on-america-today/

Last week, Americans watched heartbreaking testimony about sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Democrats seem to be operating on the basis of “guilty until proven innocent,” believing the accuser without any corroborating evidence. This kind of sexual assault witch hunt actually began under former president Barack Obama — as did some of the other key social issues America is wrestling with today.

While the Left’s advocacy on social issues and identity politics long predated Obama, the former president’s policies supercharged many of the issues dividing America in 2018. His administration helped launch the current liberal cultural wave that wreaks havoc on American politics — and extends far beyond politics.

Here are five key ways Obama’s policies impacted American culture, beginning with #MeToo, sexual assault, and Brett Kavanaugh.
1. The sexual assault maelstrom.

It all started in 2011, when the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Obama’s Department of Education (DOE) issued a “Dear Colleague” letter reinterpreting Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act. The OCR letter encouraged colleges and universities to set up what Harvard law professors Jacob Gerson and Jeannie Suk called a “sex bureaucracy.”

Separate Title IX offices at colleges across the country heard sexual assault cases, doling out punishments on their own. These mini bureaucracies operated off of the false assumptions that police are biased against sexual assault victims, that 1 in 4 women on college campuses are raped, and that basic due process protections for the accused would violate the rights of the “victims.” Men who have been falsely accused — and even acquitted by real police investigations — have seen their lives and reputations destroyed.

Obama personally established the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault in 2014, and he teamed up with Joe Biden to launch the “It’s On Us” campaign on these issues.

Trump’s DOE, under Betsy DeVos, rightly reversed these practices. Even so, the idea that “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply in sexual assault cases has permeated popular culture, and reared its ugly head in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mail Laced with Ricin Received at Pentagon Mail Facility By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mail-laced-with-ricin-received-at-pentagon-mail-facility/

Two pieces of mail intended for top Pentagon officials have tested positive for ricin and are being further analyzed by law enforcement.

“On Monday, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency detected a suspicious substance during mail screening at the Pentagon’s remote screening facility,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said in a statement today. “The envelopes were taken by the FBI this morning for further analysis.”

“All USPS mail received at the Pentagon mail screening facility yesterday is currently under quarantine and poses no threat to Pentagon personnel,” he added.

The mail facility is separate from the Pentagon building, ensuring the more than 20,000 employees there were never exposed to the letters.

CNN reported that the letters were addressed to Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.

Ricin is a poison that is released from castor beans if the beans are crushed; it can also be derived from the waste products left after castor bean processing to make castor oil.

Ricin can be delivered in powder or pellet form, dissolved into liquid, or sprayed as a mist. It was used in the 1978 London assassination of Georgi Markov with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Symptoms of exposure, which differ depending on whether ricin is inhaled or ingested, to the toxin begin anywhere from four to 24 hours after exposure. Death can occur within 36 to 72 hours; there is no antidote. CONTINUE AT SITE

HIS SAY: A LEFTIST JOURNALIST ON ANTI-SEMITISM

Even hardened leftists occasionally stumble on a truth: Jonathan Saul Freedland is a leftist British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest column bashes Kavanaugh and “the insidious force in global politics: toxic masculinity.”

On this he is right:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what ‘s racism; women can define sexism (and harassment); Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something anti-Semitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic-and to treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is.

Jonathan Freeland (The Guardian- April 29th, 2016)

U.S. Pivots to China, With Nafta Deal in Hand White House officials say a strong North American trade deal gives them an advantage in talks with Beijing By Bob Davis

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pivots-to-china-with-nafta-deal-in-hand-1538431208

White House officials are betting that concluding a trade deal with Mexico and Canada will give them more ammunition in their high-stakes battle with China on economic issues and national security.

A renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump advisers argue, removes the possibility that a trade war could break out on the continent and will make North America a more attractive place for investment.

When combined with U.S. tariffs against China, which boost the costs of production there, foreign companies will start moving investment out of China, the administration calculates. That would weaken China’s ability to produce next-generation technology and put additional pressure on Beijing to make trade concessions sought by the U.S.

The U.S. will “reclaim a supply chain that has been off-shored to the world,” President Trump said at a press conference Monday.

Former White House strategist Steven Bannon said the Trump strategy from the outset was to pull investment out of China and remake global supply chains, but then the effort got thrown off track when administration deputies battled over steel and other trade issues and the U.S. launched fights with Europe, Canada and other allies.

“Nafta was the key to pick the lock on the global supply chain,” he said.

Some big technology companies have said privately that they have begun weighing whether to shift some production out of China to avoid U.S. tariffs. CONTINUE AT SITE

Turkey: Building Mosques, Erasing Christianity by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13063/turkey-mosques-christianity

While Turkey’s latest mosque is being inaugurated in Germany, the greatest Christian Orthodox theological school has remained closed for almost 50 years by the order of the Turkish government. Moreover, less than a kilometer away from the shuttered Christian seminary, a major new center of Islamic studies spanning a total area of 200 acres is scheduled to be built.
The Greeks of Turkey — the remnants of the once great Byzantine Empire — are a severely persecuted and even almost completely exterminated people. They have been exposed, among other crimes against humanity, to a genocide, pogroms and forced deportations at the hands of multiple Turkish governments. As a result, there are only around 1,300 Greeks left in Istanbul. But in spite of its tiny size, the dying Greek community still suffers from discrimination and violations of its rights.
The Turkish government, which keeps the country’s greatest Christian theological school closed, is spending a large portion of its annual budget on the worldwide construction of mosques.

The Turkish government spends hundreds of millions of dollars building mosques as part of a long-term effort to promote Islam around the world. Many Muslims hope that new mosques throughout Europe will advance and facilitate their wish to spread Islam to non-Islamic countries and persuade the Christian “infidels” to abandon their faith in favor of Islam.

On September 29, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inaugurated Turkey’s latest European mosque, “The Cologne Central Mosque,” located in the Cologne, Germany.

Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Ken Loach, Brian Eno, Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and 21 others defend Jeremy Corbyn

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

‘We believe that significant parts of the UK media have failed their audiences by producing flawed reports that have contributed to an undeserved witch-hunt against the Labour leader [Jeremy Corbyn] and misdirected public attention away from antisemitism elsewhere.’

Flawed reporting on antisemitism claims against the Labour party Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Ken Loach, Brian Eno, Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and 21 others write about a recent report by the Media Reform Coalition.”We have long had serious concerns about the lack of due impartiality and accuracy in the reporting of allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. The recent report by the Media Reform Coalition examining coverage of Labour’s revised code of conduct on antisemitism shows that we are right to be concerned.”

With the Kavanaugh Fight, Political Warfare Escalates By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/01/with-the-kavanaugh

Scorched earth. That’s the tactic the Democrats and their enablers in the media and George Soros-funded hit squads are employing against Brett Kavanaugh. We all know it. We all experienced that sharp intake of breath when it was first reported that Dianne Feinstein had a letter from some anonymous female accusing Kavanaugh of having engaged in sexual misconduct with her when he was in high school. Depending on your estimate of Judge Kavanaugh’s character, you focused either on “sexual misconduct” (“Now we’ve got ’em matey!”) or on “high school” (“Really? You’re going after a guy with a sterling record because he may have hit on a girl at a party in high school?”)

I belong firmly in the latter camp. But of course that was just the beginning of an extraordinary, and orchestrated (I want to emphasize that) effort to destroy a man of exceptional ability and exceptional integrity.

Eventually, we learned the name of his accuser: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Almost three weeks after she went public, we still don’t know much about her. Before her accusation became public, she took great care to scrub her activities from social media and the internet. But have no fear. Even as I write, many people, outraged at her totally unsupported allegations, are piecing together a portrait of a rambunctious party girl who grew up to be an anti-Trump activist. I look forward to inspecting the portrait when it is finished.

Initially, the curious thing was how the letter—sent, Feinstein insisted, in confidence—was leaked. I believe I am correct in saying that only three sets of people had it: Ford’s lawyers (why did she engage left-wing anti-Trump lawyers just before this became public? Who is paying for them?), her local congresswoman, and Senator Feinstein’s office. I am glad that President Trump has asked the FBI to look into who leaked the letter. I’d like to know.

At first, I inclined to the idea that this obviously damaged person (I say that after having sat through her artfully incoherent, wounded-little-girl testimony) was just collateral damage in the Democrats’ effort to destroy Donald Trump’s nominee. She really did, I thought, want anonymity and was terrified at testifying before all those big meanies in the Senate.

Of course, she was treated with fawning obsequiousness. Every Democrat began his panegyric with praise of her “bravery” and “courage” in coming forward to retail her “credible” accusations.

Abbas’ Deceit Evading peace and negotiation. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271456/abbas-deceit-joseph-puder

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, has denied U.S. claims that the Palestinians have refused to enter peace talks with Israel according to the Associated Press (September 21, 2018). This is the same Mahmoud Abbas, who like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, walked out of peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Mahmoud Abbas has done nothing but evade bilateral negotiations with Israel while incessantly repeating the longstanding irredentist demands.

Palestinians, it seems, have much greater concerns to attend to than worry about President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mahmoud Abbas’ (Abu Mazen) leadership has been less than an inspiring. His presidency of the Palestinian Authority (PA) ended in January, 2009, and he has not called for elections since. January, 2019 will mark the 10th year that Abbas has held the office of President of the PA without a mandate from the people. Worse yet, Abbas’ Fatah party was kicked out of the Gaza Strip in 2007 by Hamas, which won a parliamentary majority in 2006. The autocratic Abbas, in the words of Palestinian civil and human rights activist, Bassem Eid, “represents only his wife and three sons.”

Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for failing to accept the generous peace deal offered to him in 2008 by the dovish Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In a New York Times article (June 11, 2011), former PM Olmert said that he and Abbas were very close to a peace deal two years earlier. Abbas however hesitated, and Olmert was then beset by legal troubles, as well as the Gaza war between Hamas and Israel, all which caused their talks to end.

In his memoirs published by Israel’s daily Yediot Ahronot, and in an interview with the New York Times, Olmert revealed that the two sides had agreed on key principles: the state of Palestine would have no military; an American-led international security force, not Israeli soldiers, would be stationed on its border with Jordan; Jerusalem would be shared, with the holy sites overseen by a multinational committee; and a limited number of Palestinian refugees would be permitted back into what is now Israel, while the rest would be generously compensated. The two agreed that Israel would keep some land in the West Bank on which settlements had been built, but disagreed on how much. Abbas failed to grab the best possible deal he was offered to make peace and establish a Palestinian state.

Are We a Nation of Snowflakes? What’s at stake for our country in the Kavanaugh confirmation. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271483/are-we-nation-snowflakes-bruce-thornton

For ten days now, we have been obsessing over something that may have happened to a psychology professor 36 years ago when she was fifteen. According to Christine Ford, Judge Brett Kavanaugh pushed her into a room, groped her, tried to disrobe her, and put his hand over her mouth. Ford is vague on details like when and where, has named witnesses who contradict her, and lacks any other corroborating evidence. Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor invited to cross-examine Ford and Kavanaugh last week, said she couldn’t have even obtained a search warrant to investigate this charge if it had been made at the time, let alone 36 years later.

Welcome to the snowflake nation, where unsubstantiated and unprovable charges of an attempted “rape” that allegedly took place years ago are reported with hyperbolic emotional rhetoric seldom seen for actual rape or murder. Given the confirmed, devastating brutal abuse of women taking place every minute across the globe, including in the U.S., this obsession over an unsubstantiated claim just shows how spoiled and entitled many Americans are.

Of course, the obvious reason for the hysteria on display throughout the confirmation process is amoral politics. The progressive Dems know that their most powerful weapon is a Supreme Court that dismisses the Constitution as an archaic document that must be adapted to the conditions of modernity. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will lose that weapon for decades, and their program of creating a technocratic oligarchy that erodes individual and state freedom will be stopped.

More specifically, the attack on Kavanaugh is about Roe v. Wade, which the new justice is allegedly itching to overturn. On-demand legal abortion has become the most important achievement both for feminists and for progressives who politicize the Supreme Court in order to reject the Constitution and its Judeo-Christian foundations. The Roe v. Wade decision attacked the notion of natural rights beyond the power of the state by inventing a new “right to privacy” unmentioned in the Bill of Rights. It also weakened the critical components of the separation of powers. It usurped Article One’s investment of legislative power in Congress, and weakened the idea of federalism that reserved for the sovereign states those law-making powers beyond the few originally reserved for Congress. The assault on Kavanaugh has focused so passionately on Roe v. Wade and abortion in order to defend the victories won by the “living Constitution.”