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Ruth King

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Scandals Sanitized with Linguistic Trickery By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 21st, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/21/scandals-sanitized-with-linguistic-

Throughout Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s massive report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation are lots of strange things. One of the weirdest is the extent to which the FBI went to make up words and phrases to disguise reality.

An early draft of the 2016 FBI report on the email scandal was reportedly subjected to linguistic surgery to exonerate the former secretary of state, who at the time was the Democratic nominee for president. Clinton was originally found to be “grossly negligent” in using an illegal email server. That legalistic phrase is used by prosecutors to indict for violation of laws governing the wrongful transmission of confidential government documents.

Yet the very thought of a likely President Clinton in court so worried the chief investigator, FBI Director James Comey, that he watered down “grossly negligent” to the mere “extremely careless.”

FBI investigators also had concluded that it was “reasonably likely” foreign nations had read Clinton’s unsecured emails. Comey intervened to mask such a likelihood by substituting the more neutral word “possible.”

Former President Barack Obama was found to have improperly communicated with Clinton over her illegal server while she was in a foreign country. Obama had denied that fact by falsely claiming that he never knew of her server until much later, after it was publicized.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

EDWARD CLINE: IF HILLARY HAD BECOME PRESIDENT PART 2

By on June 21st, 2018

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/06/if-hillary-had-become-president-ii.html

This is a continuation of my previous column, “Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election” and what news we would be rationed with by the MSM and the Clinton regime.
Barack and Michelle Obamawould debut their first Netflixe ffort, “Black is the New White,” in which President Clinton has an extended, walk-on-speaking role, portraying herself. It will use archival news footage, and be a fictional account of her struggles to win the Democratic nomination and her valiant effort to secure the electoral and national votes to win the election, based roughly on her autobiographical book from 2016, What Can Happen. The screenplay would be penned by Robert DeNiro with Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale). Gwyneth Paltrowwould portray Clinton in most of the scenes, and Jeff Goldblum would play her loyal Secret Service Chief.

The President would host a special dinner in the White House for news reporters, Hollywood celebrities, and members of Congress who criticized Donald Trump before and after the 2016 presidential campaign. She would give special plaudits to actor Peter Fonda and comedienne Kathy Griffin. Fonda was famous for calling for Barron Trump to be kidnapped from Mrs. Trump’s arms and locked in a room with pedophiles, while Griffin gained notoriety for posing with a fake decapitated head of Donald Trump to express her opposition to the candidate’s policies. Charles Schumer, Senator for New York, and Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, also attended the dinner, and would be praised by the President for their steadfast and often vociferous opposition to Donald Trump.

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The ACLU Retreats From Free Expression The organization declares that speech it doesn’t like can ‘inflict serious harms’ and ‘impede progress.’ Wendy Kaminer

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-expression-1529533065

The American Civil Liberties Union has explicitly endorsed the view that free speech can harm “marginalized” groups by undermining their civil rights. “Speech that denigrates such groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality,” the ACLU declares in new guidelines governing case selection and “Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities.”

This is presented as an explanation rather than a change of policy, and free-speech advocates know the ACLU has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates. ACLU leaders previously avoided acknowledging that retreat, however, in the apparent hope of preserving its reputation as the nation’s premier champion of the First Amendment.

But traditional free-speech values do not appeal to the ACLU’s increasingly partisan progressive constituency—especially after the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The Virginia ACLU affiliate rightly represented the rally’s organizers when the city attempted to deny them a permit to assemble. Responding to intense post-Charlottesville criticism, last year the ACLU reconsidered its obligation to represent white-supremacist protesters.

The 2018 guidelines claim that “the ACLU is committed to defending speech rights without regard to whether the views expressed are consistent with or opposed to the ACLU’s core values, priorities and goals.” But directly contradicting that assertion, they also cite as a reason to decline taking a free-speech case “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Warmists lynching an innocent bystander, CO2 By Viv Forbes

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/warmists_lynching_an_innocent_bystander_co2.html

I live in SE Queensland. Yesterday the surface air temperature rose from a frosty 36ºF at sunrise to a balmy 72ºF in mid-afternoon. The enormous heat needed to achieve this 36º of warming came via radiation from the sun. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no significant part in this daily heating event – in fact it may intercept a tiny proportion of the incoming solar radiation and re-radiate it in all directions, thus keeping the daytime surface temperature a tiny bit cooler than it would have been otherwise.

At the deep Mount Isa Mine in NW Queensland, the surface temperature may average about 77ºF but it increases by about 20ºF every 50 meters of depth – rock walls are red hot in places. The enormous heat causing this comes via conduction from Earth’s geothermal heat plus some oxidation and heating of the sulphide ores as they come in contact with natural air containing oxygen. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no part in this heating.
There are volcanic windows open right now in Hawaii, Japan and the Galapagos revealing the vast resources of volcanic geothermal heat which is always migrating towards the cooler surface, sometimes violently.

Temperatures vary greatly over Earth’s surface, making a mockery of attempts to calculate an “average” for the globe. Air surface temperature may be minus -22ºF at the South Pole, while at the same time it can be plus 86ºF at the Equator. This enormous difference is caused by the varying intensity of solar radiation striking the surface – carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no significant part in creating this variance.
Surface air temperatures in big cities can be 9ºF hotter than surrounding rural land partly because bitumen roads, roofs and runways heat up more than grassy or forested countryside. Mega-cities are also full of heat-producing humans, engines, trains, vehicles, air conditioners, heaters, stoves, fridges, pumps and mowers.

Urban heat also comes from the warm bodies and hot exhalations from millions of humans digesting carbon-based foods, from stored chemical energy from burning hydro-carbons (wood, lignite, coal, oil and gas) or from nuclear power. Using green energy also adds to urban heat. Wind towers and solar panels extract energy from wind and sun in the countryside and release it where most of the electricity is used, usually in cities and suburbs. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no measurable part in producing these islands of urban heat.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Ties That Bind: Russia, Iran, Hezbollah By Herbert London

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/11/ties-bind-russia-iran-and-hezbollah-but-theyre-rip/
Syria has become the “sick man” of the Middle East, a territory laden with death and homelessness. In 2014 erstwhile president Barak Obama invited the Russians into the region to control the use of poison gas by their surrogate Bashar Assad. In 2015, as the Russians intervention expanded President Obama said this “is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire.” Senator McCain responded on the Senate floor that the policy of the Obama administration “replaced the risk of action with the perils of inaction.”

Today we can see the perils of inaction unfold. Russia is dominant over nearly half of Syria, within only a few months of the intervention, Russian presence had put an end to any serious attempt by backers of the rebels to topple the Assad regime.

Moreover, Russian leaders reached an accord with Turkey which had attempted to destabilize the regime and instead reached an alliance based on its active hostility to the Kurds. It can now be asserted that with these alterations in policy, almost all those countries that once backed the opposition now depend on Russia to salvage the situation for them in Syria. It is by consent that Russia is the “strong horse of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The idea that Russia would serve as the balance wheel against Iran when it also maintains a tenuous alliance demonstrates the belief it is a better guarantor of stability than the United States. However, the Russians have not displayed consistency. Jordan, the U.S., Lebanon hoped that Russia would depart from its alliance with Iran and allow for a hopeful vision of the future. That has not yet emerged. But the State Department continues to believe Russia can be drawn away from its ties to Iran and Hezbollah. This initiative drives the present Russian-U.S. negotiation in the area.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Obama officials rushed to explain photos from 2014 that went viral showing locked-up immigrant children — and Trump’s facilities look the same

By on June 20th, 2018

http://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5

Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children in cages went viral in May, and former Obama administration officials rushed to offer explanations.
The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had even shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump’s presidency.
The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government had been attempting to place with family members.
On June 17, reporters toured a similar government holding facility in McAllen, Texas, where migrant families are separated from one another and held in cages.

Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets last month to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.

The images, which the Associated Press first published in 2014, resurfaced recently for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Migrant Question Western nations are fracturing on the issue. Theodore Dalrymple

By on June 20th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/migrant-question-15980.html

Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government—anxious to prove its credentials—refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government—equally anxious to do the same—accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.

This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.

The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?

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Sea Change by Mark Steyn on Europe

By on June 20th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8700/sea-change

When every last Trudeau eyebrow has been scraped off the floor of the Manoir Richelieu, it’s worth remembering that the divisions in the G7 are not quite as straightforward as the media would have us believe. For one thing, it’s not G6 vs Trump; there’s another disrupter in town:

Just met the new Prime Minister of Italy, @GiuseppeConteIT, a really great guy. He will be honored in Washington, at the @WhiteHouse, shortly.

Signor Conte heads what would once have been regarded as a pantomime-horse coalition of two rear ends: the left-wing Five Star Movement (M5S) and the right-wing Northern League (Lega). The so-called GroKo – the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat “Große Koalition” that governed Germany for most of the last thirteen years – was regarded as an alliance of all the prudent, sensible, mainstream persons, the kind who think nothing of admitting one-and-a-half million poorly educated, largely unemployable, demographically transformative young Muslim men into a country and then wondering why the gang-rape statistics are through the roof. By contrast, the Italian government is a coalition of the non-prudent non-sensible non-mainstream – the “alt-left” and the “far-right”. So how can that possibly work?

Well, we’re about to find out. In the two weeks he’s been in office, the new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini (leader of the Lega) has talked non-stop about migrants and his plans to deport over half-a-million of them: “The good times for illegals are over,” he declares confidently. “Get ready to pack your bags.” On election day, his party won 17 per cent of the vote; after a fortnight of deportation talk, he’s up to 27 per cent. Having talked the talk, he’s now walking the walk: For the first time since the “humanitarian crisis” began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.

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TOMMY ROBINSON’S LETTER FROM PRISON AUDIO

By on June 20th, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3VPWzSXQQg

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Daryl McCann The Great Bohemian Cultural Revolution

By on June 20th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/great-bohemian-cultural-revolution-enemies/

The proselytisation of postmodernist theory, according to Jordan Peterson, is less an emancipatory project than intellectual charlatanry and the relinquishment of individual responsibility. If a truth is validated by its teller’s enemies, the Canadian academic is right on the money.

Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos contains the kind of advice the parents and teachers of Baby Boomers were keen to impart to us all those years ago, advice that we weren’t so keen to hear: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (Rule 1), “Make friends with people who want the best for you” (Rule 3), “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world” (Rule 6), “Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie” (Rule 8), “Be precise in your speech” (Rule 10), and so on. They all sound like the message of some black-and-white television comedy from the 1950s. 12 Rules for Life, by my reckoning, is about seventy years too late.

It was one-time Quadrant editor Roger Sandall who, in The Culture Cult (2000), characterised the modern-day Left as less Marxian than bohemian. The 1960s social revolution was not so much against the bourgeoisie who owned and controlled the means of production as against bourgeois or Christian mores, which we might define as anything from traditional morality and workaday sobriety to enlightened patriotism. Everything, in other words, the Beatles and their acolytes circa 1963–69 wanted to discard. Sandall put it this way:

… it is certainly true that bohemianism is more deeply hostile to the values of the bourgeoisie than Marxism ever was. To understand why this is so, remember Ben Franklin’s useful virtues—temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, chastity and humility. Some of these values are compatible with social democracy. One or two of them found a place in the Communist world. But none are compatible with bohemia.

Peterson self-identifies as a British-style classical liberal, and yet so much of what he writes and says are the contemplations of an anti-bohemian conservative:

Because children, like other human beings, are not only good, they cannot simply be left to their own devices, untouched by society and bloom into perfection … This means they are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined and properly encouraged. This means that it is not just wrong to attribute all the violent tendencies of human beings to the pathologies of social structure. It’s wrong enough to be entirely backward.

The reader encounters an entreaty on Franklin’s useful vir

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