ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Green NGO Climate Propaganda Enablers Climate change is a national security threat—but not in the way the national security elite assumes. By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/28/chinas-green-ngo-climate-propaganda-enablers/

Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, Greenpeace opened an office in Moscow. It enjoyed the patronage of a leading member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and enjoyed Kremlin funding, laundered through a state-owned record company. The green activist group made clear that it would have nothing to do with environmental groups in the Baltic republics. Recycling standard Soviet propaganda, Greenpeace denounced them as little more than separatist organizations.

This was by no means a one-off. The inconvenient truth: the environmental movement fought on the wrong side of the Cold War. In the early 1980s, it used the “nuclear winter” scare to try to stop Ronald Reagan’s nuclear build-up and undermine the West’s ability to negotiate the arms agreement that effectively ended the Cold War. It turns out that nuclear winter had been concocted by the KGB and transmitted to America by executives of the Rockefeller Family Fund. A nuclear winter conference held in 1983 was supported by 31 environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

This pattern, wherein the West’s enemies use the environmental movement—whether NGOs like Greenpeace, foundations, or “concerned scientists,” to undermine Western interests—is now being repeated, this time in respect to China. A report by Patricia Adams for the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation released earlier this month lays bare the role of the green movement in acting as China’s propagandists.

Since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party eight years ago, almost everyone who believed China’s Communist regime would become more benign internally and less threatening externally has revised his opinion—everyone, that is, apart from climate activists.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: An International “Peace” Conference to Displace Israel by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16891/palestinians-displace-israel

While Abbas is talking to the international community about his desire to achieve a peaceful settlement alongside Israel, his Fatah faction is sending messages to the Palestinians that glorify the “armed struggle” against Israel and that promise a “revolution until victory” — meaning replace Israel.

The poster chosen by Fatah to celebrate the January 1, 1965 anniversary of the first terrorist attack against Israel depicts a map of “Palestine” superimposed over the entire state of Israel.

It is important to note that Fatah is one of the groups forming the Unified Leadership of the Palestinian Resistance. When the Palestinians talk about “resistance,” they are referring to actions such as throwing rocks and firebombs at soldiers and settlers, as well as stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks.

Abbas has long been dreaming of a multi-party conference that will impose a solution on Israel. He does not want to hold direct negotiations with Israel.

Abbas claims to the international community that he just wants to establish a Fatah-controlled Palestinian state next to Israel, with the help of the UN, Russia, China, and the European Union…. He does not want Biden and other world leaders to hear the messages of violence that Fatah is spreading (in Arabic), including his pledge to “liberate Palestine.”

What Fatah is saying in Arabic is infinitely more important than what Abbas writes in a letter to the UN secretary-general or to any world leader…. Failure to call out the Palestinians for their self-contradictory messages will not advance any cause of peace, but, on the contrary, only further embolden Palestinians to carry out more terrorist attacks and thwart the way to peace.

The Palestinian ruling Fatah faction has just celebrated the 56th anniversary of the launching of its first terrorist attack on January 1, 1965 by promising, in Arabic, to continue the fight to do away with Israel. On that day, Fatah terrorists attempted to bomb Israel’s National Water Carrier.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Two Newly-Elected Progressives Decline to Say if They’ll Back Pelosi for Speaker By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/two-newly-elected-progressives-decline-to-say-if-theyll-back-pelosi-for-speaker/

Representative-elect Cori Bush (D., Mo.) and Representative-elect Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), both of whom are progressives, declined to say Sunday if they will vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker.

“I am going to make sure that voices of the people of St. Louis are heard and we have what we need. And so you will find out then,” Bush said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Host Dana Bush then asked Bowman, who said, “You will find out when my vote is tallied and, again, organizing with our community to figure out what’s best.”

Bush beat out Representative William Lacy Clay Jr. in August before handily winning election in November. Bowman defeated longtime New York Representative Eliot Engel in the Democratic primary in July.

Pelosi is looking to serve her fourth two-year term as Speaker of the House, where Democrats hold a small majority after losing ten seats in the November election. Meanwhile, some Democrats will leave their posts to hold positions in the Biden administration.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has emerged as the de facto spokeswoman for House progressives, criticized her party’s leadership in an interview earlier this month for refusing to cede power to a new generation of lawmakers.

“I do think that we need new leadership in the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said on The Intercept’s podcast Intercepted. However, there aren’t any alternative candidates for House leadership positions because the party didn’t invest in “real grooming of a next generation of leadership.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Racism Reign of Terror Begins at University of Rhode Island The Cultural Revolution targets an insufficiently woke faculty. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/racism-reign-terror-begins-uri-insufficiently-woke-richard-l-cravatts/

Seeming to give credence to Bertrand Russell’s observation that “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts,” yet another campus engulfed in race hysteria has set its sights on administrators and faculty who purportedly have not exhibited sufficient contrition for their racism according to the current moral arbitrators of race awareness. 

In this case, black students and a particularly race-agitated faculty member at the University of Rhode Island (URI) created something they named The Diversity Think Tank, whose audacious role, it seems, is to “reject a worldview of white supremacy that has reigned unchallenged for 128 years at the University of Rhode Island and with ONE voice speak this Declaration of Diversity to embrace racial equity and to renounce the evils of racism and renounce the evils of white supremacy deeply embedded in our systemically racist university.”

As has happened on many campuses since the death last May of George Floyd under the knee of a white policeman, minority students and faculty at URI used the event to mobilize aggressive and bold anti-racist initiatives on their respective campuses, sensing that the time was ripe for publishing demands and extracting concessions from cowering administrators threatened by the prospect of being labeled racist themselves and insufficiently aware of the systemic, rampant racism that purportedly is engulfing campuses everywhere and causing great harm and “violence” to minority students.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Judge, Who Is Stacey Abrams’ Sister, Orders Georgia Counties To Keep Voter Rolls Dirty Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/12/judge-who-stacey-abrams-sister-orders-georgia-daniel-greenfield/

Stealing an election the old fashioned way. The classics never go out of style

“A federal judge in Georgia on Monday ordered two counties to reverse a decision removing more than 4,000 voters from the rolls ahead of the Jan. 5 runoff elections that will decide control of the U.S. Senate.

The judge, Leslie Abrams Gardner — the sister of former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a prominent ally of President-elect Joe Biden who has led voter registration efforts across the state — concluded that the counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address data to invalidate registrations in the two counties.”

I like the use of ‘concluded’ to pretend that there was some sort of process here, as if Judge Stacey’s Sister had to think long and hard about whether she would allow the election to proceed free of interference… or help her sister take over the state.

“Gardner, an appointee of President Barack Obama, noted the recusal request in her ruling granting the restraining order and said she is declining to step aside.

“The Court has reviewed the motion and finds no basis for recusal. An Order detailing the Court’s reasoning is forthcoming,” the judge wrote.”

The fox has reviewed the request that it stop guarding the henhouse and eating all the chickens and finds no basis for the request.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Person of the Year – The Disenfranchised American Voter The elites can steal an election. But they can’t steal a movement. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/person-year-disenfranchised-american-voter-daniel-greenfield/

When the Constitution formed this nation, we were a country of around 4 million. But in 2020 at least 74 million Americans have had their votes tossed in the trash along with the Constitution.

More Americans had their votes discarded, stolen, nullified, corrupted, and obstructed in this election than existed in the entire United States when it fought for its independence from monarchy and tyranny, when it brought into being a “more perfect union”, when it expanded westward, and when brother against brother fought in a civil war to preserve that union.

There were more Americans who voted for President Trump than were living in the United States in 1890. The entire nation, as it was in 1890, had its vote usurped by a corrupt oligarchy.

While the battles go on across cable news and social media, these are the forgotten men.

They were the forgotten men and women who rallied to Reagan and to Trump, falling behind in a nation whose elites can’t wait to leave 1787 and 1890, along with old mill towns, steel plants that made a nation’s skyscrapers, rusting factories that once supplied her people, port cities on whose ships cargoes once flowed to the world that are now filled with Made in China junk ships.

They are the coal miners who were told to learn to code, managers dragged into unconscious bias training before being fired anyway, carpenters sidelined by illegal aliens, police officers beaten by grad students chanting Black Lives Matter, IT men whose jobs were offshored, women who were called ‘Karens’ for calling 911 after being attacked in a mall parking lot.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Still More Evidence That Biden Is Wrong About Mask Mandates

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/29/still-more-evidence-that-biden-is-wrong-about-mask-mandates/

A poll out last week found that 75% of Americans say they support a nationwide mask mandate to fight COVID-19. Why shouldn’t they, since the public has been told repeatedly by politicians and public health officials that these steps will slow the spread of the disease and save lives.

Yet new research provides clear evidence that – whatever the lab results of mask-wearing and disease spread might suggest – real-world mask mandates do little, if anything, to slow COVID-19.

The survey, conducted by STAT and the Harris Poll, found there is a partisan split on a mask mandate: 60% of Republicans favor a mandate, compared with more than 85% of Democrats.

Joe Biden promises that, once in the White House, he will order masks on federal property and interstate travel, while pressing state and local leaders to push for mandates. The oft-repeated claim is that this would save hundreds of thousands of lives.

But that is largely based on experimental data, which show that, when worn properly, masks are very effective in preventing the disease from being spread, and provide protection among wearers from getting it.

Too bad the real-world evidence – you know, the stuff scientists rely on to test their theories – doesn’t support any of this.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

2020: the year racial identity took over A backward and divisive racial ideology has filled the vacuum left by disillusionment in the West. by Inaya Folarin Iman

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/27/2020-the-year-racial-identity-took-over/

2020 was the year that a divisive form of racial identity politics, embodied in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, was accelerated and institutionalised.

BLM brought with it a politics of victimhood, a view of races as rigidly defined and adversarial, and a view of the past as something to be sanitised and fought against. The cowardice and capitulation of our institutions to censorious mob pressure made 2020 the year we nearly lost our collective grip on reality.

The intensity of lockdowns, under which billions around the world were confined to their houses, provided the pressure-cooker conditions for BLM’s volcanic eruption on to the global stage. The case of George Floyd in the USA appears, in this sense, merely an opportunistic pretext for an outpouring of self-righteous rage.

What was most striking was the response of the political, cultural and economic elites. BLM, a movement based on fundamentally flawed assumptions and flawed conclusions, was able to demand, and to some extent attain, significant changes to society – the removal of statues, the explosion of corporate diversity programmes, the encroachment of the ‘decolonise the curriculum’ movement – with little sustained pushback from our institutions. You only need to look to history to find several occasions when bad ideas were legitimised as the one and only ‘truth’. But how did today’s bad ideas take over?

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How Joe Biden risks the biggest giveaway ever to China in space By Gordon G. Chang,

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/531794-joe-biden-risks-the-biggest-giveaway-ever-to-china-in-space

People on the NASA transition team of Joe Biden are urging the United States to start what could be the biggest transfer of technology to China. The giveaway could result in the Chinese military dominating space and, with it, world affairs. “Trying to exclude them, I think, is a failing strategy,” said Pam Melroy, a former astronaut and potential next administrator of NASA, referring to the Chinese. “It is very important that we engage.”

Important to engage? The Chinese space program is military at its core and, to the extent it is civilian, it serves as a conduit to the military. China has a policy of civil military fusion. This means the army has first call on anything and everything in civilian hands. Moreover, we should not forget the structure of the Chinese regime. The military is an operation of the Communist Party, which controls all the programs of the Chinese central government as well as every educational and research institution in the country. The space program is a party venture.

The Chinese military has major plans for the Moon, sometimes called the eighth continent. As military analyst Richard Fisher told me, “China wants to mine helium from the Moon to power its future fusion energy reactors and to use Moon resources to help build enormous solar energy collecting satellites to free it from foreign energy dependence.”

China also plans to colonize the Moon with military bases. “By controlling the Moon, China can control access to the Lagrangian Points and better control access to Mars and other planets,” Fisher, who is affiliated with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said. Stations floating at Lagrangian Points, orbital locations where gravitational forces balance and make it less expensive to maintain artificial objects in space, would allow China to dominate the new “interstates” to the heavens.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Japan’s Biden Jitters From Tokyo, a pointed Taiwan question for the President-elect.

Posted By on December 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-biden-jitters-11609197375?mod=opinion_lead_po

In a 2020 campaign with little foreign policy substance, the idea Joe Biden mentioned most was restoring alliances. Which alliances? With Mr. Biden’s inauguration less than four weeks away, some allies in the Asia-Pacific are apprehensive.

Last week Japan’s number-two civilian defense official told Reuters: “We are concerned China will expand its aggressive stance into areas other than Hong Kong. I think one of the next targets, or what everyone is worried about, is Taiwan.”

Yasuhide Nakayama added: “So far, I haven’t yet seen a clear policy or an announcement on Taiwan from Joe Biden. I would like to hear it quickly, then we can also prepare our response on Taiwan in accordance.” He also asked, according to Reuters, “How will Joe Biden in the White House react in any case if China crosses this red line?”

Hardliners in Beijing see democratic Taiwan as a separatist province and are determined to bring it under their control. They also want Taiwan’s advanced microchip technology. Meanwhile, opinion in Taiwan has moved against unification, especially as China reneges on its treaty obligations by arresting democracy supporters in Hong Kong. A Chinese military operation across the 110-mile Taiwan Strait during Mr. Biden’s term can’t be ruled out.