BOOKS Comments turned off

Daryl McCann: Big Brother’s Loyalty

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/07/big-brothers-loyalty/

In his rushed-to-press book, ‘A Higher Loyalty’, James Comey reveals himself as a congenital lawyer with a special talent for obfuscation and self-exoneration. That such a creature rose so high lends enormous credence to Donald Trump’s grievances against the Deep State.

It’s too easy to mock the title of ex-FBI Director James Comey’s memoir A Higher Loyalty. Higher loyalty to whom? Jim Comey? Comey himself anticipates the charge by confessing upfront in the Author’s Note that he “can be stubborn, prideful, overconfident, and driven by ego”, character flaws he has struggled with his “whole life”. No kidding. A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership might be an exercise in self-righteousness, confesses Comey, but whether that is accurate or not—and our author, unsurprisingly, quickly proceeds to deny it—his enmity towards President Donald Trump happens to be based on something more substantial than Comey’s own bruised ego. Ethics is Comey’s word for it. I am, perhaps surprisingly, inclined to agree; but with the proviso that ideology rather than ethics be designated as James Comey’s moral compass.

There is something big lurking in the depths of Comey’s memoir and to uncover it we must address three key issues: (a) the exoneration of Hillary Clinton; (b) Comey’s boyish admiration for Barack Obama; and (c) the brutal denigration of Donald Trump. In the first instance, the former FBI director’s exoneration of Hillary Clinton in A Higher Loyalty is a tricky business, as was his pronouncement in July 5, 2016, that Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in the use of a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State but that, in his judgment, “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her for mishandling classified information, either “intentionally or in a grossly negligent way”. We now know the FBI “sensitive matters team” never had any intention of recommending charges against Candidate Clinton in 2016 and that, as Candidate Trump would say, “the fix was already in”.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The latest global warming scare might make you want to kill yourself By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/the_latest_global_warming_scare_might_make_you_want_to_kill_yourself.html

Too many “scientists” have too much grant money and too much computer time on their hands, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in grant money ($32.5 billion from 1989 to 2015, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute) that the federal government has been dispensing for “climate change research.” Put together a proposal to find a new scary correlation, and odds are you’ll be bringing in the federal cash, to the delight of your university (that gets to appropriate a third or so of the grant for “overhead”). That’s why we have hundreds and hundreds of bad things that global warming (or climate change) supposedly will cause.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the latest claim, one that bears the imprimatur of Stanford University.

More people are likely to take their own lives as the planet warms, say researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley in a study published Monday that suggests yet another worrisome impact of climate change.

The multidisciplinary research team looked at nearly 1 million suicides in North America and found that hotter temperatures correlate with higher suicide rates. The warming projected through 2050, the group figures, could increase suicide rates by 1.4 percent in the U.S. and 2.3 percent in Mexico over that time, resulting in 21,000 additional deaths in the two nations.

The role of heat, the authors said, may be just as significant as other, more well-known drivers of suicide, like economic hardship, which also pushes rates up, and suicide prevention programs and gun control legislation, which tend to push rates down.

I certainly feel despair when it gets too hot. That’s why I moved to coastal California, where it rarely gets into the nineties. But if this holds water, we ought to see that suicide rates pretty closely correlate with average temperatures. A look at suicide rates by country reveals no such relationship. Here are the top 20 countries:

POLITICS Comments turned off

McCaskill and the Swamp A senator’s husband enjoys rising earnings from government-backed investments. James Freeman

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccaskill-and-the-swamp-1532467234

Who says newspapers are dying? The Trump newsprint tariffs aren’t helping, but daily journalism appears to be alive and well at the Kansas City Star, which performs a public service today in illuminating a lucrative area of the Beltway swamp. Specifically, the Star details the rising income from federally-subsidized investments enjoyed by the spouse of a U.S. senator.

“Businesses tied to U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill’s husband have been awarded more than $131 million in federal subsidies since the Missouri Democrat took office in 2007,” reports the Star.

The newspaper details the surge in income for Ms. McCaskill’s husband, Joseph Shepard, as a result of his investments in government-backed housing projects. According to the Star:

In 2006, the year before McCaskill entered the Senate, her husband’s personal income from those investments was between $1,608 and $16,731, according to the senator’s financial disclosure forms.

In 2017, five years into McCaskill’s second term, Shepard personally earned between $365,374 and $1,118,158 from investments in housing projects that received federal subsidies, the disclosure forms show. Disclosure forms only provide ranges of income.

There’s no evidence that McCaskill played any part in directing federal funds to businesses affiliated with her husband.

The senator’s campaign tells the Star that she has nothing to do with her husband’s investments and the paper notes that he was investing in affordable-housing projects long before he met the senator, whom he married in 2002.But lately Mr. Shepard seems to have become much better at selecting such investments. According to the newspaper:

POLITICS Comments turned off

Don’t Underestimate the Socialist Surge on the Left By John Hart

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/24/dont_underestimate_the_socialist_surge_on_the_left_137601.html

A Democratic “blue wave” may or may not be able to overcome the Republicans’ majority and structural advantages in the 2018 midterm elections. But the bigger story that’s brewing is the dramatic and nationwide leftward shift of the Democratic Party. The socialist surge has potential to reshape not just the party but American politics for generations to come.

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York primary was the most significant political upset since Tea Party Republican Dave Brat defeated then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014. Her victory wasn’t an isolated incident. Democratic-socialist candidates also scored wins in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives and, in 2017, in Virginia’s House of Delegates.

Meanwhile, in California, the Democratic state party executive committee decided to endorse progressive stalwart Kevin de Leon over Dianne Feinstein. (Feinstein won the open primary, but in California the top two finishers, even if members of the same party, run against each other in the general election.) Feinstein has major advantages in the November face-off (name ID and fundraising) and will likely prevail. But when Dianne Feinstein is deemed too conservative for the Democratic Party a major shift is underway.

The Democratic socialists hoped to start a new chapter in their crusade with a rally last week in the heart of America: The event took place in Wichita, Kansas. For Kansas’s conservatives, the rally was the political equivalent of “Red Dawn.” The Bernie Sanders liberation army, under the leadership of General Ocasio-Cortez, parachuted into the heart of Koch country (Wichita is the headquarters of Koch Industries) to pick a fight and make a point. Ocasio-Cortez said they chose the location to prove that “an honest, grassroots, lobbyist-free movement for working-class Americans can work anywhere.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who benefits from John Brennan’s security clearance? It sure isn’t America. Daniel McCarthy

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://spectator.us/2018/07/who-benefits-from-john-brennans-security-clearance/

John Brennan had a tough time when he took his first CIA lie-detector test in 1980. He was asked a standard question as to whether he had ever belonged to an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government. Not quite, but almost: just four years earlier Brennan, then a student at Fordham University, had cast his first vote for president for the candidate of the Communist Party USA. Brennan had never been a party member—just a Communist voter.

The CIA let him in. A little more than thirty years later, he was appointed by Barack Obama to lead the agency. But now, ex-CIA director Brennan is questioning the patriotism of Obama’s successor, accusing the president of being an agent of Moscow. “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’ Brennan wrote on Twitter. “It was nothing short of treasonous.”

Comrade Brennan would know, right? But no—a dumb college kid’s vote for the CPUSA is no more treasonous than a president who takes a less adversarial approach to Russia than Democrats demand. Brennan has evidently never had a good grasp of the U.S. Constitution, whether as a Communist-voting student or the nation’s top spy. That he now turns policy disagreements and personal disgust into “nothing short” of treason is par for the course.

Sen. Rand Paul, the Republican who votes against Trump more often than any other in the U.S. Senate, has called on the president to strip Brennan of his inactive security clearance. Trump is considering doing just that. He’s contemplating depriving Michael Hayden, Susan E. Rice, James R. Clapper Jr., and other former intelligence officials who have been critical of him of their clearances as well. Democrats claim that this is intimidation, though the question on many observers’ minds is: why do so many ex-officials have these clearances in the first place?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

No Detectable Lead Poisoning in Flint After All By Kyle Smith

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/flint-michigan-water-no-lead-poisoning/

The city’s kids made photogenic victims, but thankfully the scare was overblown.

The numbers are in on the lead contamination of Flint, Michigan’s water in 2014–15, and it’s time for a sigh of relief. Medically speaking, the lead in the water turned out to be a non-event.

The increase in lead content in children’s blood after the water debacle was small. Tiny, in fact. How tiny? It was basically statistical noise: 0.11 micrograms per deciliter, which is within the range of normal fluctuation. Two experts explain in the New York Times:

A similar increase of 0.12 micrograms per deciliter occurred randomly in 2010-11. It is not possible, statistically speaking, to distinguish the increase that occurred at the height of the contamination crisis from other random variations over the previous decade.

Lead is dangerous and it’s proper to be vigilant about it. In terms of municipal management, or politics, the lead saga in Flint shouldn’t be overlooked. Any negligence should be adequately punished. If you behave in a grossly careless way and somehow no one gets hurt, you were still grossly careless.

Yet in terms of lead in the water in the Flint, the inescapable takeaway from the Times op-ed by professors Hernán Gómez, the lead author of the study “Blood Lead Levels of Children in Flint, Michigan: 2006–2016,” and Kim Dietrich, the principal investigator of the Cincinnati Lead Study, is that the children of Flint dodged a bullet when the city water supply was switched from the Detroit River to the Flint River in 2014. (In 2014–15 there was an outbreak of the bacteria-based Legionnaires’ disease in Flint that caused the deaths of 12 people, but ten of the 12 were linked to a single hospital called McLaren Flint.)

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Yes, Heat Waves Are a Part of Nature By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/yes-heat-waves-are-a-part-of-nature/

As often happens when extreme weather hits, the media is featuring excited claims that the July heat wave is due to man-made climate change. But it isn’t. These events are easily explained as natural phenomena, yet a major practice used by those exploiting climate and environment for a political agenda involves claiming natural events are unnatural.

The Guardian is a familiar source of these stories. In “Heatwave sees record high temperatures around world this week” (July 13), the Guardian’s global environment editor Jonathan Watts writes:

Record high temperatures have been set across much of the world this week as an unusually prolonged and broad heatwave intensifies concerns about climate change.

On June 28, the Washington, D.C.-based group Public Citizen, through two members of the Public Citizen’s Climate and Energy Program,issued a “NOTE TO REPORTERS AND EDITORIAL BOARDS” with this headline:

As Extreme Heat Warnings Sound in New York This Weekend, Remember to Connect the Dots Between Extreme Heat and Climate Change

The sub-headline was even more definitive:

Extreme Heat and Record-Breaking Heat Are Linked to Climate Change

There is no doubt that some places have seen record high temperatures of late. For example, Glasgow just had its hottest day on record, hitting 89.4°F (31.9°C). But consider how short the historical record is: about 120 years.

That’s 0.000000026% of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

There were many times when the planet, Glasgow included, has been far hotter (and colder) than today. Consider the situation in the continental United States on July 1 and 2, as illustrated in the following figure: CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA Comments turned off

Fake Hate: Texas Waiter Made Up Story About Racist Note; Media Fooled Again! WaPo, Newsweek, BBC, USA Today, CBS News, NY Post, The Root, and many other media outlets went all in. By Debra Heine

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fake-hate-texas-waiter-made-up-story-about-racist-note-media-fooled-again/

Last week the mainstream media went all in on an unverified story about a waiter in Texas who got a “racist note” from a mean and nasty racist patron who wrote “We don’t tip terrorist” on the top of his bill.

The Washington Post, Newsweek, ABC, BBC, USA Today, CBS, New York Post, Huffington Post, The Root, and many other local, national, and international media outlets ran with a sketchy story, even though the exact same type of hoax has been tried before.

Most — if not all — of the reports were written without the smallest degree of skepticism, even though the MSM should be savvy enough by now to be wary of such stories because the odds are pretty good that they are going to turn out to be fake hate.

But the dream narrative of the establishment media is to show racist white people trying to victimize minorities and so such stories are always “too good to check,” as they say, and so the fake story went viral.

Here’s a sample from Newsweek, where they laid it on so thick readers were probably reaching for the Kleenex box by the end:

Texas restaurant is standing behind its waiter after a customer refused to leave him a tip and instead left behind a message calling him a “terrorist.”

Khalil Cavil shared a photo on Sunday of the customer’s nasty note—“We don’t tip terrorist”—and his name circled on the top of the $108 bill at Saltgrass Steak House. The customers did not leave a tip.

“At the moment I didn’t know what to think nor what to say, I was sick to my stomach,” the 20-year-old waiter wrote on Facebook. “Although, this is nothing new, it is still something that will test your faith.”

Cavil is working at the steakhouse in Odessa, Texas, as he gets ready to head to Dallas Baptist University later this year, the Odessa American reported. He wrote that he chose not to get angry but instead “decided to let this encourage” him and “fuel me to change the world.”

“I have decided to let this encourage me, and fuel me to change the world the only way I know how. So to all the haters out there, keep talking, your [sic] only helping me step into my destiny!” he added.

CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA Comments turned off

Denver Post Runs Letter to the Editor Demanding Trump’s Execution By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/denver-post-runs-letter-to-the-editor-comparing-trump-to-soviet-spies-demanding-his-execution/

On Saturday, the newspaper of record in Colorado published a letter to the editor demanding the execution of President Donald Trump. The paper’s opinion editor insisted that was not the author’s intent, but the letter speaks for itself.

“If it walks like a traitor, and talks like a traitor, and acts like a traitor … it is a traitor,” Lakewood resident Suzanne Gagnon wrote in a letter to the editor published by The Denver Post on Saturday. Gagnon did not hesitate to suggest what should be done with “traitors” like Trump.

“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on a basis of far less evidence than is had on Trump and many in his administration,” she wrote. “Besides being in agreement with the actions recommended in the editorial of July 19, I believe there are many more actions that can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.”

Execution is the historic punishment for traitors, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spies convicted and executed for espionage. While the Rosenbergs’ children argue that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted, there is a broad consensus among historians that both were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties. Many historians argue they should not have been executed. In the words of Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, they were “guilty — and framed.”

It is possible that Suzanne Gagnon’s sentence about the Rosenbergs could be read as a call to not have them executed, but in the context of her declaration of Trump as a traitor and her ominous suggestion that “many more actions … can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.,” it seems far more likely she was indeed calling for Trump’s execution.

The Denver Post defended publishing the letter to the editor, however, arguing that Gagnon did not call for Trump’s execution.

“We would never run a letter suggesting that the president of the United States be executed,” Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial page, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Upon reviewing this letter, I don’t think that was the letter writer’s intent.”

“She wrote to be critical of an editorial I wrote lauding Sen. Cory Gardner’s efforts to impose sanctions on Russia and supportive of another editorial we had run that suggested actions Congress could take to respond to the Helsinki press conference,” Schrader argued. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ireland’s Anti-Israel Bill and the Muslim Brotherhood by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on July 24th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12733/ireland-israel-boycott

The Irish bill could have a negative impact on American companies with subsidiaries in Ireland: it is illegal under US anti-boycott laws to cooperate with a ban on commerce with Israeli settlements.

What is behind the proposed bill? One possible explanation is the prominent role played by Islamic institutions and organizations in Ireland, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. There is evidence to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood has established its European headquarters in the Emerald Isle.

Leaked US Embassy cables indicated that even some Irish Muslims refer to a certain mosque in Dublin as “Tora Bora,” a cave complex on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. One of the mosques imams, Yayah al-Hussein, originally from Sudan, is a member of Hamas, and many of its congregants are Bosnian and Afghan jihadists.

On July 11, the Irish Senate approved a bill criminalizing local companies that engage in commerce with Israeli firms based in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Introduced in the body’s Upper Chamber by independent member Senator Frances Black, the bill passed initial muster, in a 25-20 vote with 14 abstentions. The Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill, 2018 would prohibit any import of goods or services from “occupied territories,” with financial penalties of a quarter million euros in fines and up to five years imprisonment for violators.