BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Our Fossil-Fuels Future By Robert Zubrin

Posted By on June 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/our-fossil-fuels-future/

Alex Epstein explains why the world needs more fossil fuels.

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, has delivered another knockout punch against Green ideology. Aptly entitled “Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less,” Epstein’s new work includes the comprehensive factual case for fossil fuels as he presented it in his earlier book. He then proceeds to eviscerate the mental framework behind the war on fuel.

Epstein begins his discourse by identifying the “knowledge system” being used to perpetrate the anti-carbon crusade. He then very reasonably states that any judgment regarding the positive or negative nature of any phenomenon, including fossil-fuel use, should include consideration of both its pluses and minuses. He then describes the extraordinarily positive impact of fossil-fuel use on the development and maintenance of modern civilization. In particular, he focuses on the unprecedented gains in health, productivity, education, mobility, safety, life spans, leisure time, living standards, environmental quality, and practically any other index of human well-being one could mention. He does this with the help of a series of graphs, as follows.

In figure 1, he shows that, far from causing a climate catastrophe, fossil-fuel use has virtually ended climate catastrophes, with the number of climate-related deaths falling 98 percent in the last century. Epstein says this is due not to any marked improvement in the climate but rather to increased societal resiliency as a result of our growing fossil-fuel-enabled technological powers. For example, deaths due to extreme temperatures have been greatly reduced through effective home heating and air conditioning, and deaths due to famine have been virtually eliminated both by the abundance produced by fossil-fuel-driven fertilized and irrigated agriculture and by modern society’s fossil-fuel-enabled ability to rapidly transport food around the world. In addition, he says, CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere has accelerated the rate of plant growth worldwide. This is true, as shown by NASA satellite data. He could also have mentioned that warming has expanded the growing season, as shown by EPA data. (Climate alarmists never mention this, either, even though it is the strongest proof of the reality of warming. Guess why not.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

If Only We Could Turn Hillary Loose on the FBI Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on June 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/if-only-we-could-turn-hillary-loose-on-the-fbi/

If historical accountability now outweighs all concerns about due process, how could you do better than a Hillary Clinton trial?

‘Whither John Durham?” That is now the pressing question for every Russiagate watcher. Admittedly, the crowd of Russiagate watchers has grown smaller since Tuesday, when a Democrat-heavy jury in Washington, D.C., acquitted Michael Sussmann, the heavyweight Democratic lawyer, of Special Counsel Durham’s charge that Sussmann had lied to the FBI.

The answer, if we are to learn the central lesson of the Sussmann case, is simple: Indict Hillary Clinton.

But . . . for what?

I’ll resist the urge to say, “There’s always something,” which would be more a commentary on the career of the former secretary of state (and cattle-futures trader, travel-office-staff director, grand-jury amnesiac, “bimbo eruptions” scourge, pardons coordinator, voice of calm, suspender of disbelief, Russian “reset” visionary, Benghazi bungler, Muslim-movie maven, charity entrepreneur, and homebrew-server savant) than a real answer.

The truth is I have no idea whether Hillary has done anything indictable this time. Orchestrating the Trump–Russia collusion farce is icky politics and maybe even civil libel. But whether it violated the criminal law in some way is a tougher question.

I do know this, though: If you really want to get to the bottom of what is scandalous about Russiagate, there could be no surer way to do it than to indict that most ruthless of cutthroat, cold-blooded politicians and sit back and enjoy the show as she sets her phalanx of gladiator–lawyers on the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, and the Obama White House.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘It Became Necessary to Destroy the Country to Save It’ By David P. Goldman

Posted By on June 5th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/05/30/it-became-necessary-to-destroy-the-country-to-save-it-n1602025

Peter Arnett’s celebrated quote — “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” — was a fabrication during the Vietnam War but has a macabre application to Ukraine. American fecklessness and Russian rapacity together will leave a grease spot where Ukraine used to be. It was all tragically, idiotically unnecessary.

I argued in 2008 and on many subsequent occasions, including the February 2014 note in PJ Media reposted below. The obvious course of action in Ukraine was to permit its people to vote for a divorce, as the Czechs and Slovaks did. Instead we elected to keep the NATO option open for Ukraine, knowing that this was a red line for Russia. Never mind that Putin is a wicked fellow; he is a predictably wicked fellow with a well-defined understanding of Russian national interest, and his response to Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership was entirely predictable.

After three months of nearly-unanimous media predictions of the collapse of Russia, it now appears that the Russian army is close to controlling the Donbas. Extricating it will be difficult if not impossible. The result, as Henry Kissinger suggested at Davos last week, will be (eventually) a peace in which Ukraine cedes territory to Russia. All the “don’t appease Putin-Hitler” rhetoric will simply make us feel shabbier when we make the deal. We should feel shabby. We screwed this up on the grand scale.

Our bathetic outpouring of sympathy for Ukraine served mainly to obscure the ugly fact that Russia has better strategic weapons than we do (hypervelocity missiles and the S-400/500 air defense systems). No doubt the Russian army is corrupt, as Western commentators aver, but not so corrupt by orders of magnitude as our Pentagon, which pays top dollar for obsolete weapons while Russia and China innovate. The Javelin and Switchblade and Stinger are fine toys, but the West remains in fear of Russian nuclear weapons–as well we should. The Biden Administration won’t sent long-range missiles to Ukraine because it fears, correctly, that Ukraine might use them to attack targets deep inside Russia and start a broader war.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Corporate Wokeness Is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on June 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/corporate-wokeness-is-the-last-refuge-of-scoundrels/

On Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg — chief operating officer of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and author of the 2013 female-empowerment book Lean In — told Fortune that she was resigning because of the fierce urgency of the moment with the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade: “This is a really important moment for women. This is a really important moment for me to be able to do more with my philanthropy, with my foundation.”

This is what is known as getting ahead of the story. The very next day, the Wall Street Journal reported the real story:

In reality, it was the culmination of a yearslong process in which one of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business that she was instrumental in building. More recently, there was a fresh irritation: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him. The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said. The couple has been engaged since 2020.

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Wannsee’: Where the ‘Final Solution’ of the Holocaust was pushed – review Book recounts battle about how fast to exterminate Jews By Janet Levy

Posted By on June 5th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-708406

They met on January 20, 1942, at a luxury villa on park-like grounds overlooking Lake Wannsee, a recreation site a half-hour’s drive from Berlin. Built by a wealthy industrialist, the villa was now held by an SS foundation. They were 15 top Nazi officials – among them nine lawyers and eight with doctorates. In that idyllic setting, in a meeting that lasted 90 minutes, they decided the “Jewish question” – how to deport 11 million people to labor camps and kill any who survived. If they differed, it was on the details. Never on the intent – mass murder.

Holocaust expert Peter Longerich’s illuminating book Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution begins by describing the meeting on that wintry day. The description brings out Nazi cynicism and cold-bloodedness: convening at a pleasure spot to plan genocide. Longerich draws on the only remaining record of the meeting: the “minutes” prepared and distributed by Adolf Eichmann with instructions for destruction after review. 

One minister disobeyed, and his copy was discovered by the US Army in 1945. The document summarizes the main lines of discussion and the decisions reached; it estimates Jewish populations in 30 countries, sets out specific territories where fit Jews should be made to work in labor gangs subjected to “natural wastage”; and it says survivors would be disposed of in an unspecified manner.

The participants at the Wannsee Conference, called by Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, broadly represented all facets of the Reich. They did not actually initiate the Holocaust; it had already been haphazardly set in motion by disparate factions of the Nazi machinery. What they achieved was consensus. Those horrified by plans for exterminating Jews were pressured into compliance as evidence of their commitment to the Nazi goal of purifying the German volk.

Reichstag president Hermann Göring had made Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), directly responsible for the “Final Solution.” But even before the Wannsee Conference, deportations had begun, at Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s behest, in October 1941. The first death camps had already been built. Agencies of the Reich were carrying out uncoordinated campaigns of mass murder and competing to propose radical solutions. The conference defined “Jewishness” for the Nazis’ base purposes, decided on what to do with half-Jews, and created an RSHA-led master plan for eliminating Jews. It channeled intention into a systematic extermination program.

Right from the time they came to power in 1933, the Nazis instituted discriminatory policies to remove Jews from public life, boycott their businesses, impose curfews on them, force them into labor, and harass, humiliate, intimidate and exploit them. Enacted in 1935 and imposed the next year, the Nuremberg Laws included statutes that forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and decreed that only those of pure German blood were eligible to be citizens of the Reich.

According to Longerich’s book, the conference should be seen in the context of two significant factors: the outbreak of the Second World War and the rivalry between Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, another architect of the Holocaust.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

To Biden Administration on Iran: Do Not Leave Americans, Allies, in the Dark by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on June 4th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18582/us-iran-allies

“By every indication, the Biden Administration appears to have given away the store. The administration appears to have agreed to lift sanctions that were not even placed on Iran for its nuclear activities in the first place, but instead because of its ongoing support for terrorism and its gross abuses of human rights. The nuclear limitations in this new deal appear to be significantly less restrictive than the 2015 nuclear deal, which was itself too weak, and will sharply undermine U.S. leverage to secure an actually ‘longer and stronger’ deal. What is more, the deal appears likely to deepen Iran’s financial and security relationship with Moscow and Beijing, including through arms sales.” — 49 U.S. Senators, press release, March 14, 2022.

Now, Iran’s negotiating team — with which U.S. interests are being negotiated by the same Russia currently trying to crush the Western-backed democracy, Ukraine — has excluded not only the U.S., but also those countries directly impacted by the Iran’s nuclear breakout and terrorism: the latest countries it is devouring: Syria and Iraq.

The Biden administration must not exclude the U.S. regional allies and the American people from the ongoing negotiations with the Iranian regime and keep them in the dark: they are the ones directly affected by any “deal.”

How could America allow Israel — not to mention itself — to be excluded from the negotiations to lift sanctions on the Iranian regime when the ruling mullahs have made it clear that their top ideological priority is to eradicate the Jewish state and “wipe Israel off the map”? Recently, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, known as the “butcher of Tehran” after reportedly being involved in the 1988 massacre of nearly 30,000 political prisoners, openly called again for the destruction of Israel:

“This great movement that we are witnessing today in the form of protests is a symbol of the solidarity of the Muslim people that will lead to the destruction of the Zionist regime.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

COVID: The Lessons We Dare Not Forget Phil Shannon

Posted By on June 4th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/06/covid-what-we-have-learned-and-dare-not-forget/

As COVID fever, in contrast to actual cases, continues to subside globally it is time to take stock of two-plus years of irrational fear and policy madness.  Learning from the economic, social and political debacle of the global response to the virus is essential to ensure the temptations of authoritarian rule by public health ‘experts’, in cahoots with their political enablers, are resisted when the next health ‘crisis’ hits (monkeypox, anyone?).

Below are fifteen of these COVID lessons. 

LESSON #1: Viruses will do what viruses do

The path to the COVID policy disaster began with the failure to recognise that any new virus will do what every respiratory virus has done – spread rapidly until the more lethal variants die off with their more vulnerable hosts and more transmissible, but less deadly, variants become dominant, resulting in the familiar Gompertz Curve of rapid rise, followed by a plateau and then swift decline as herd immunity develops from robust, naturally-acquired infections amongst the healthy and their immune systems.

SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus that is behaving exactly in accord with this evolutionary blueprint and it is the utmost hubris to imagine humanity can ‘socially distance’ it into defeat, and it is the height of unwarranted technophilia to think it can be vaxxed into submission with either  revolutionary, rushed-into-production concoctions subjected to scant and hurried clinical trials. Governments can only pretend, for political reasons, to alter or prevent the predictable trajectory of a virus, a fact by now which should be apparent to all.

We wasted two enormously costly years by failing to remember this very old lesson about viruses being viruses and doing what viruses do.  This was the foundational error that set in train all the policy errors that followed.

LESSON #2: Unethical, anti-democratic, unscientific and ineffective 

The verdict is in after the world’s first-ever global social experiment in locking down entire populations of healthy people to stop the spread of a virus.  Every cross-comparative analysis between national and state jurisdictions, in chart after chart of viral incidence, hospitalisation and mortality the world over, shows that lockdowns do not make a bit of difference, not even the brutal, full-strength Chinese brand.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Poll Finds No Pride for Preferred Pronouns for Kids By Matt Margolis

Posted By on June 4th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/03/poll-finds-no-pride-for-preferred-pronouns-for-kids-n1602968

Last month, a school district in Wisconsin filed sexual harassment complaints under Title IX against three 8th-grade students because they referred to a classmate by the wrong pronoun. While this is a frightening development, it is somewhat comforting to know that a majority of voters believe that children should be referred to by their biologically (and grammatically) correct pronouns.

The latest Harvard-Harris poll found that 59% of those polled believe children should be referred to by their biological sex, while 41% say kids should be able to pick their pronouns.

Sixty percent of those polled say letting kids pick their pronouns is an “excessive measure that does more to confuse kids about their sex,” and 40% believe it prevents discrimination.

As you might have expected, party identification plays a huge factor in how those who were surveyed responded. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans believe children should be referred to by pronouns corresponding with their biological sex, while 61% of Democrats believe children should be able to pick whatever pronouns they want. Sixty-four percent of Independents believe children should be referred to by their biological sex—putting Democrats’ position on the fringe.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary’s Attorney ‘Operated’ an FBI Office at Law Firm, But Wait, It Gets Worse… By Victoria Taft

Posted By on June 4th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/06/03/hillarys-attorney-operated-an-fbi-office-at-law-firm-but-wait-it-gets-worse-n1602734

Do you ever get the feeling that we’re playing checkers while our enemies are playing chess? That things are not as they seem? That’s the way it feels in the story of Spygate, the Trump-Russia collusion lie, FBI corruption, and the latest chapter of that entire sad and duplicitous saga that was lived out in a D.C. courtroom this week. Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted by a jury whose forewoman said she felt the special counsel team led by John Durham should have better things to do than investigate a lawyer supposedly lying to the FBI about the president being a Russian spy.

No biggie, you understand.

As I reported for PJ Media, the evidence in the Sussmann case pointed to an extraordinarily cozy relationship between the FBI and Perkins Coie. Sussmann had credentials to get inside the FBI and was considered to be a trusted Confidential Human Source (CHS).

But the latest news about this relationship gives rise to more and more troubling questions.

Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) say a whistleblower informed them that Perkins Coie, for which Hillary and the DNC’s campaign attorneys Marc Elias and Sussmann worked, had an FBI outpost there. That’s right, an office space inside the Perkins Coie law firm was run  “in concert with the FBI,” according to Gaetz. And Michael Sussmann was “operating that worksite.”

There could be a simple (cough) explanation to which the proletariat are not privy on why the FBI would have an outpost there, but Gaetz has a few questions. In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (see video below) Gaetz wondered, “What reason would there be for that? What leverage would the Perkins law firm have over the FBI given this work they’re doing together? Why would [FBI Director] Christopher Wray allow it to continue?”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Cult and Their Green Lethargy Future Environmentalists have waged war on fossil fuels, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism in general. Their “solutions” will make us all poorer, more vulnerable, and less free. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

Posted By on June 4th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/03/the-climate-cult-and-their-green-lethargy-future/

When I was in Congress, I once went on a fact-finding trip to Pakistan. At the time, the country was being wracked by a terrorist bombing campaign intended, in large part, to destabilize the government of President Pervez Musharraf. What I found, however, was that President Musharraf was facing another threat to his rule. 

During a brief stay in Islamabad, my hotel room suddenly went dark one evening. It wasn’t terrorism. It was a rolling power blackout. Earlier, I had heard firsthand accounts of the dissatisfaction this caused Pakistanis, including how the rolling blackouts facilitated extremism’s spread and tactics. The blame for the blackout was placed squarely on Musharraf. As I looked out my window across an eerily darkened capital city, given all the challenges facing them, I couldn’t help but pity the Pakistani people for having to endure yet another tribulation: having to live with such a substandard power grid.

Now, the Pakistani people can pity me.  

Per Fox News, the apocalyptic climate cult is bringing their rolling blackouts to Michigan to benight the state whose ingenious, hardworking people and the unparalleled industrial prowess they built and operated had once put the world on wheels and kept the world safe.