RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employed the prestigious National Academy of Sciences to whitewash the EPA’s illegal experiments on human beings. Naturally, the sordid activity is all being conducted in secret.

Several years ago, we detailed for American Thinker readers how we had discovered that the EPA was violating virtually every law enacted and regulation promulgated for the protection of human experiments since the development of the Nuremberg Code.

The story begins in the 1990s, when the EPA began regulating fine particulate matter (P.M.) in outdoor air. These regulations were justified on the basis that they would prevent 15,000 premature deaths per year. The supposedly scientific studies underlying the rules could not be challenged at the time because the EPA refused to provide Congress and independent researchers with the key underlying data. Also, the relevant laws and their judicial interpretation did not provide a way to challenge EPA science in court.

Though the EPA got away with issuing the rules, it knew they were vulnerable to challenge because the underlying studies – all dubious statistical correlation studies – didn’t actually show that P.M. killed anyone. Neither did animal toxicology studies, no matter how much P.M. the laboratory animals inhaled. So the EPA decided to back up its statistical claims by testing extremely high doses of P.M. on real, live people.

Over the next 15 years, the EPA began quietly experimenting on elderly subjects (up to age 80), asthmatics, people with heart disease or metabolic syndrome, and combinations of the aforesaid by placing them in a sealed chamber and making them inhale high levels of P.M. as well as diesel exhaust, smog, and even chlorine gas. At one point, the EPA even experimented with children by spraying high levels of diesel exhaust particulate up their noses.

Though none of these experiments produced any biological response indicating that P.M. is in any way harmful, the EPA relied on its statistical studies to make even more grandiose claims about the supposed dangers of P.M. The EPA claimed that any inhalation of P.M. could cause death. It claimed that death could occur within hours of inhalation or after decades of inhalation. In 2011, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress than P.M. caused about 570,000 deaths per year in the U.S., more than 20 percent of all U.S. deaths.

The EPA continued its experiments.

We found out about the experiments in September 2011, when the EPA finally published a report about an alleged health effect caused by P.M. Agency researchers exposed an obese 58-year-old woman with heart disease to a high level of P.M. The experiment was stopped when the woman’s heart began to beat irregularly. She was taken to the hospital, where she remained overnight. The EPA’s report chalked up the event to the exposure to P.M.

Donald Trump is not so much running against Hillary Clinton as against the inner demons of Donald Trump.

The 2016 election still should easily be his to win.

Americans do not historically like the twelve-year regnum of any party.

The termed-out incumbent Democratic president can win approval ratings of 50 percent only by staying quiet, out of the public eye, and doing as little governing as possible. Whenever Obama emerges from his hip cocoon and talks off his teleprompter, he reminds us that he is typically petulant, untruthful, and rambling. Witness his latest pathetic assurances that sending cash on pallets at night to obtain simultaneous release of hostages was not ransom. Even the obsequious pajama-boy D.C. press corps did not quite buy that. As so often, Obama’s soft-spoken prevarication comes across as being as coarse as Trump’s crudity.

Hillary Clinton is the weakest Democratic candidate since her moral superior Jimmy Carter in 1980. She reminds us of her liabilities daily, whether lying repeatedly that the FBI director had not systematically stated she had been untruthful about her unlawful e-mails, or, in a screeching voice, proclaiming her determination to raise taxes on the middle class — not to reduce the $600 billion deficit but to add more entitlements. Is a young lathe worker or forklift driver to pay more so that a Bernie Sanders supporter can get free tuition? Next, she seemed to have fallen into a bizarro world when she remarked, “The Trump kids have killed a lot of animals.” Pundits forget that at any given moment, a “short-circuited” Hillary Clinton can say anything — or do anything, such as discussing the fate of a soon-to-be-doomed Iranian scientist on an unsecured e-mail server. Never Trumpers often fail to appreciate that Hillary is quite capable of trumping Trump in controversy and self-destructiveness — with the force multiplier that she is not a potential public servant but someone who has been almost nothing but one.

Half the public hates the political and media elite of the Eastern corridor and their West Coast bookends in Hollywood and the tech industry. A David Brooks takedown of Trump or another Hillary endorsement from a Silicon Valley billionaire seems free Trump publicity. Is the working class reassured of Hillary’s credentials by a Warren Buffett endorsement or a nod from Meg Whitman?

The news cycle of the next 100 days also favors Trump: weekly more of the same of Islamic-inspired international terrorism, coupled with Chamberlain-like, politically correct Western appeasement. Black Lives Matter, with the sanction of the Democratic party, will only grow more brazen. (But how does one top disrupting a moment of silence for slain policemen or using a bullhorn to segregate journalists by race?)

There is little long-term optimism to make us forget the daily news disasters. Permanent near-zero interest rates, unsustainable new debt, Obamacare, insidious overregulation, record labor-force non-participation, and tax hikes will keep the economy stagnant — if we are lucky. An entire forgotten population of the former working American public has simply disengaged from the economy and turned to government support, help from friends and family, drugs and drink, or apathetic hopelessness. They almost seem the majority in my hometown.

One of the most egregious legal frauds in history may finally be over. On Monday a unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was the product of fraud, coercion and bribery and couldn’t be enforced.

In a 127-page opinion, Judge Amalya Kearse said the court “found no basis for dismissal or reversal” of a lower court’s decision and called lawyer Steven Donziger’s conduct in pursuit of Chevron “corrupt” and a fiasco of legal terrorism and ransom at the highest level. “Donziger hoped for an astronomic estimate that would have an in terrorem effect,” the court wrote, “impelling Chevron to agree to a settlement.”

That’s an understatement. Readers will recall the parade of malfeasance perpetrated by Mr. Donziger as he pursued a $113 billion case for what he claimed were oil pits left by Texaco (now merged with Chevron) in the 1970s. Texaco’s pits had long been cleaned up and the company had been released from liability by Ecuador’s government, but Mr. Donziger lined up environmentalists and even actress Daryl Hannah to create a media circus that would force the company to settle. CONTINUE AT SITE

The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with the 20th century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” On American campuses today, I suspect that the operative word is “committee.”

On Aug. 1, Yale University president Peter Salovey announced that he is creating a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. There has been a craze for renaming things on college campuses the last couple of years—a common passion in unsettled times.

In the French Revolution, leaders restarted the calendar at zero and renamed the months of the year. The Soviets renamed cities, erased the names of political enemies from the historical record, and banned scientific theories that conflicted with Marxist doctrine.

At Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard and elsewhere, students have demanded that buildings, programs and legacies be renamed to accommodate modern sensitivities. Amherst College has dropped Lord Jeffrey Amherst as its mascot because the colonial administrator was unkind to Indians. Students at the University of Missouri have petitioned to remove a statue of the “racist rapist” Thomas Jefferson. This is part of a larger effort, on and off campuses, to stamp out dissenting attitudes and rewrite history to comport with contemporary prejudices.

But isn’t the whole raison d’être of universities to break the myopia of the present and pursue the truth? Isn’t that one important reason they enjoy such lavish public support and tax breaks?

A point of contention at Yale has been the residential college named for John C. Calhoun, a congressman, senator, secretary of war and vice president. Alas, Calhoun was also an avid supporter of slavery.

Mr. Salovey is also perhaps still reeling from the Halloween Horror, the uproar last year over whether Ivy League students can be trusted to pick their own holiday costumes, which made Yale’s crybullies a national laughing stock. In the wake of that he earmarked $50 million for such initiatives as the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

He then announced that Calhoun College would not change its name. Apparently, he has reconsidered. After the Committee on Renaming has done its work to develop “clearly delineated principles,” he wrote, “we will be able to hold requests for the removal of a historical name—including that of John C. Calhoun—up to them.”

I have unhappy news for Mr. Salovey. In the great racism sweepstakes, John Calhoun was an amateur. Far more egregious was Elihu Yale, the philanthropist whose benefactions helped found the university. As an administrator in India, he was deeply involved in the slave trade. He always made sure that ships leaving his jurisdiction for Europe carried at least 10 slaves. I propose that the committee on renaming table the issue of Calhoun College and concentrate on the far more flagrant name “Yale.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The world has a serious problem, that of the massive number of refugees fleeing middle eastern war torn countries. The vast majority of these refugees are Syrian and Iraqi Muslims while non-Muslims constitute less than three percent.

Some countries refuse to admit refugees. Lebanon and Jordan shut their borders to Syrians in 2014. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United-Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman will not take a single refugee because of the crime and violence threat to their safety, as Jihadist terrorists hide among those fleeing.

After the Paris attacks, Poland said, ” Forget about taking in refugees.” Turkey has ended its open door policy of admitting Syrian refugees. Last autumn, Hungarian soldiers sealed her border with barbed wire. By refusing to issue visas, Egypt effectively closed its borders to Syrian refugees. Switzerland’s pertaining to Muslims is ” If you reject our customs, we will reject your application.” On the other hand Slovakia is OK taking in Syrians – as long as they’re not Muslim.

The massive migration is due to warring Islamic factions with ISIS as the main aggressor. ISIS has declared that it is restoring the Islamic Caliphate naming Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph and designated him as political leader. ISIS is attempting to establish itself, by force if needed, as the leader of one Islamic world, worldwide Muslim movement with no national boundaries.