ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Sorry Greta, Humanity Is Still Here and Stronger Than Ever By Jason Isaac

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/06/21/sorry_greta_humanity_is_still_here_and_stronger_than_ever_942196.html

Hope you don’t have any exciting weekend plans. By the time you read this, humanity has already been wiped out.

Hasn’t it?

On June 21, 2018, Greta Thunberg tweeted that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Five years have come and almost gone, and the tweet has been suspiciously deleted.

Thunberg is claiming her point was misinterpreted, but any way you look at it, the climate cartel is dead wrong — again — about the fate of humanity. In fact, there’s almost nothing about the climate change movement that stands up to science.

Since Thunberg’s fatalist tweet, climate rhetoric has risen to a fever pitch, but fossil fuel usage hasn’t dipped at all. Nationwide oil, natural gas, and coal consumption last year was about equal to annual averages from the 2010s.

It’s not for lack of trying. Even after decades of multibillion-dollar subsidies and seemingly unanimous public support, renewables still only represent 4% of our energy. As nice as wind and solar energy sound, renewable technology just isn’t capable of serving as a primary energy source. It may not be for generations, if ever. If “whole of government” support from Washington, mind-boggling corporate investment, and rabid virtue-signaling from the media and pop culture isn’t enough to move the needle, what will?

No matter how shrill the climate cartel cries that the end is near, the American public just isn’t willing to sacrifice the benefits of affordable, reliable energy — which only fossil fuels can provide.

They see through the disinformation the climate cartel is spreading. Not only is the human race nowhere near the brink of extinction, but our lives and our environment are better than ever before.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liberty Falling John Social media fosters a reduced preference for freedom.Mac Ghlionn

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://americanmind.org/salvo/liberty-falling/

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently sounded the alarm on the “profound risk” posed by social media platforms to the mental health and well-being of children across the country.  Murthy believes that “immediate action” must be taken to protect children. He’s right. Multiple studies clearly demonstrate the association between heavy social media use and an increased risk for anxiety, depression, loneliness, and even suicidal thoughts.

According to a new paper published in Psychological Reports, heavy social media use is also associated with a reduced preference for freedom. According to the authors of the paper, two psychologists based at Swansea University, a public research university in Wales, habitual social media users may use platforms like TikTok and Instagram to escape from the challenges and unpredictable nature of the real world.

The authors discuss users’—particularly younger users—burning desire for constant social media-driven stimulation, the negative feelings associated with excessive social media engagement, and how these negative feelings affect one’s desire to be truly free. 

Before discussing the link between social media dependency and a reduced preference for freedom, it’s important to realize just how bad the dependency problem is. Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, compulsively check their social network profiles, spending an average of three-and-a-half hours online every day. That works out to one full day every week, four days per month—and 48 days per year. When it comes to compulsive social media use, Millennials are bad. But the generation after them is even worse. Gen Zers spend an average of four hours on social media every day. That’s five days each month—and 60 days per year.

The word addiction often gets thrown around recklessly. But it’s safe to say that millions of Millennials and Gen Zers are addicted to social media. Addiction is strongly associated with a number of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Update on GMOs and Health Thirty years on, there is even more evidence that GMO food are safe. Steven Novella

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-on-gmos-and-health/

There is a lot of competition for our attention, and many issues that seem urgent and controversial. Sometimes important issues just fall off the radar because of this competition. Part of our goal at SBM is to keep tabs on relevant issues – antivaccine efforts, promotion of pseudoscience in medicine, weakening consumer protection laws, and many others. That is when a lot of harm occurs, when the public is not paying attention, and fanatics are tirelessly working in the background to subvert science and public health. So when an important issue has not been in the news recently, I like to take a look and see what’s going on.

GMOs (genetically modified organisms) is one of the topics I try to track carefully, even when it’s not making headlines. The first GMO food was approved in 1994 (a GMO tomato that is no longer on the market), so we are getting close to 30 years of GMOs. Opponents of GMOs falsely claim that they have not been studied enough (there is more evidence for their safety than other food products) and that there may be long term unknown risks. They were wrong 30 years ago, but it was at least true that GMO introduction into the food market and animal feed was new. But the “new” argument, by necessity, doesn’t age well. By now, if there were any actual risk to GMO foods, we would likely be seeing the result – and we are not.

The labeling of GMOs have been updated in the US, and while there is no evidence that this is useful information to consumers, there has been a reasonable improvement. The USDA now uses the term “bioengineered” to refer to any food product that has detectable levels of altered genetic material – genes that could not have results from usual breeding techniques. The term “GMO” now is restricted to those organisms with foreign DNA introduced, usually transgenic, from distant organisms, not possible with breeding. Whereas bioengineered can refer to a host of processes, such as using CRISPR to alter existing genes without introducing new genes.

As an aside, I find it ironic that a large number of available crops were produced over the last century through mutation breeding. This technique uses chemical or radiation to dramatically increase the rate of mutation (a thousand to a million fold) to increase the number of varieties to select from. But mutation breeding is not considered GMO or bioengineered. Many other crops are hybrids, even forced hybrids that would not occur in nature. But labeling such crops would be pointless, and banning them impossible, and they constitute virtually our entire agricultural industry.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Dr. Fauci still getting a government paycheck? Senator Rand Paul isn’t sure he actually retired. Jack Hunter

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://www.based-politics.com/2023/06/21/is-dr-fauci-still-getting-a-government-paycheck/

Many believed Dr. Anthony Fauci was retiring in December 2022, based on comments the former Coronavirus Task Force leader made last year.

But Rand Paul isn’t so sure. The senator thinks Fauci might still be working on the government’s dime.

According to Fox News, on Tuesday Senator Paul’s office sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking for “additional information regarding Dr. Fauci’s employment status and receipt of taxpayer-funded benefits.”

Fox News reported, “Paul noted that Fauci said in various media interviews late last year that he was ‘not retiring’ but was going to the ‘next chapter’ and ‘moving on from [his] current positions,’ which also included being President Biden’s chief medical advisor.”

Paul said in the letter, “While many interpreted these statements to mean Dr. Fauci would be ending his employment with the federal government in December 2022, it is not clear if that is in fact the case.”

“This raises questions about Dr. Fauci’s current employment status and whether he is still receiving certain taxpayer-funded benefits associated with active public service, such as legal counsel and protective services,” he added.

Fauci and Paul went toe-to-toe many times over the doctor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, including famously over the potential origins of the virus.

Paul posited more than once that there was evidence that COVID-19 possibly was created in a lab in Wuhan, China where gain-of-function research took place funded by the U.S.

Fauci originally denied such claims, though later the NIH admitted such research had been conducted and the U.S. government footed the bill. Paul would also accuse Fauci of covering up the potential funding.

Paul was called a conspiracy theorist at the time when making his accusations, but by March of this year even the FBI admitted that a lab leak of the type the senator described was “most likely” the origin.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stop Defending Yourselves, New Yorkers! The city prosecutes another case of subway self-defense.

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-prosecutes-another-case-of-self-defense

You may have heard of the latest installment in New York City’s new fad—arresting people for defending themselves and others against violent criminals on the city’s decrepit subway system.

Last week, while riding a northbound J train through once-posh Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 20-year-old Jordan Williams and his girlfriend were accosted by Devictor Ouedraogo, a 36-year-old ex-con who had served three and a half years in prison for an attempted robbery. After completing his term, Ouedraogo was released to the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), suggesting that he is or was an illegal immigrant.

According to eyewitnesses, Ouedraogo was verbally and physically harassing other passengers in the subway car before approaching Williams and his girlfriend, who remains unnamed and has not commented on the incident. After Ouedraogo propositioned his girlfriend, Williams verbally warned him to back off. Ouedraogo allegedly responded by punching both Williams and his girlfriend in the face.

In what sounds like a legal exercise of the right to self-defense under New York law, Williams then reportedly rose to protect himself, his girlfriend, and others from Ouedraogo, who fought back. During the altercation, Williams pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed Ouedraogo, who stumbled out of the subway at the next stop. He received medical attention but later died at a hospital. As with Jordan Neely, the homeless drug addict with a criminal record who died after being restrained in a chokehold by Daniel Penny last month, no autopsy of Ouedraogo has been released, fanning speculation that the results could indicate serious drug abuse.

Williams and his girlfriend continued their subway ride, but NYPD officers apprehended them at a station down the line shortly afterward. Williams was arrested and charged with manslaughter and “criminal possession of a weapon.” (Knives are forbidden on city transit, though this has not stopped knife incidents from increasing 126 percent over last year.)

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Phonics Finally Gets Its Due in New York It took the city’s education bureaucracy 20 years to recognize that the Success Academy approach works. By Eva Moskowitz

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-finally-gets-hooked-on-a-phonics-based-curriculum-school-system-education-students-teacher-public-f019bc45?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

American students continue to suffer the effects of pandemic learning loss, as this week’s miserable National Assessment of Educational Progress scores demonstrate. But school closures and lockdowns explain only so much. If you truly wish to understand the dysfunction plaguing U.S. public schools, consider the remarkable story of Joel Greenblatt. A hedge-fund manager with no training or experience in education, Mr. Greenblatt nevertheless figured something out 20 years ago that New York City’s sprawling $38 billion school system is only now starting to realize—phonics is the key to early childhood literacy.

In 2005, as chairman of the City Council’s Education Committee, I heard about a school in Queens where the proportion of fourth-graders reading proficiently had doubled, from 36% to 71%, in four years. This school, P.S. 65, was using a phonics-based curriculum called Success for All that had been developed in the 1970s by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden at Johns Hopkins University. The curriculum’s design was ingenious. It broke down reading skills into bite-sized pieces that children could understand. Students were evaluated every six weeks, placed into small groups at the same level of reading mastery, and taught exactly what they needed to progress to the next level. Success for All’s materials were so detailed and clear that even a relatively inexperienced teacher could use them.

Implementing Success for All didn’t require tons of money or brilliant teachers making heroic sacrifices. All it required was some modest additional funding so that students could learn in small groups for 100 minutes a day. Mr. Greenblatt, who picked up the tab, thought the school could make the money go further by asking other educators—such as the assistant principal or the art teacher—to pitch in.

Union work rules made that impossible at a district school. But it could be done at a charter school, so in 2006 Mr. Greenblatt and his business partner, John Petry, founded one and asked me to run it. Conveniently, I was available, as Randi Weingarten, then president of the United Federation of Teachers, had arranged for my early retirement from politics for holding hearings questioning the wisdom of the union contracts she’d negotiated.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American Left’s Fantastic Threats Book bans? Jim Crow redux? A crackdown on gay vacationers? Joe Biden and his party are seeing things.By Barton Swaim

Posted By on June 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-lefts-fantastic-beasts-progressives-abortion-voting-book-ban-842c0d65?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden’s re-election announcement video warned that “MAGA extremists are lining up” to repeal “bedrock freedoms.” Uh oh—what freedoms? The extremists plan on “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all by making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”

It was a perfect expression of the paranoid state in which American progressivism finds itself. Leave aside for a moment the line about “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make,” a euphemistic reference to abortion. The other threats on Mr. Biden’s list—“banning” books, “telling people who they can love” and voter suppression—are literally nonexistent. Mr. Biden isn’t engaged in the time-honored political craft of exaggeration. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.

Liberal commentators have been ridiculing conservatives for fearing negligible or nonexistent threats for as long as I can remember: communist infiltration during the Cold War, Islamic extremism in the 2000s, illegal immigration in the 2010s, gender ideology in the 2020s. The right might or might not have exaggerated the urgency of these problems. But they were, or are, problems. That isn’t the case with an array of issues Democratic politicians and progressive intellectuals are exercised about in 2023. You often feel they’re so invested in the idea of a delusional right that they can’t perceive their own penchant for dreaming up nonexistent threats.

Mr. Biden is worried about book bans. The American Library Association recently claimed in a report that 2,571 books were “challenged” in American libraries last year. These challenges the ALA calls “attempted book bans,” nearly all of which involve a request by a patron that a public library or school library remove a book from its shelves because it is obscene or otherwise offensive. I’m not sure such requests are improper—young-adult fiction has become sexually avant-garde and shockingly coarse over the past two decades. Anyway, to ask that a taxpayer-supported library not facilitate children’s access to a sexually explicit book isn’t to “ban” it. An interested patron may buy it and read it in public if he wishes.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China in Cuba: Nuclear-Armed Communists on the Warpath by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on June 23rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19748/china-cuba-nuclear-missiles

While Americans think of nukes as defensive instruments to deter attacks, Chinese war planners view them as offensive weapons, to compel submission. In other words, China thinks it can prevent others from coming to the aid of, say, Taiwan, by threatening nuclear destruction of their homelands.

With all the additional silos in China, why would the People’s Liberation Army need missiles in Cuba? Think shorter flight times — meaning less warning time.

All this means that, thanks to Cuba, a war in Asia will be fought on, near, and over the American homeland — perhaps with nukes.

China, according to “fragmentary” U.S. intelligence reports, is about to establish a “joint military training facility” with Cuba on that island.

Chinese military personnel are already listening in on American communications from the Lourdes base near Havana and three other Cuban locations. Two of those locations have been known for some time: Bejucal and Santiago de Cuba. These facilities, it appears, have been in operation for all or most of this century.

“What is missing is the strategic aim of China’s economic influence, which, in my opinion, goes beyond simply having a strong trade relationship with Latin America,” Joseph Humire of the Center for a Secure Free Society told Gatestone. “At its core, the People’s Republic of China is focused on gaining geopolitical leverage over countries in Central and South America to be used in an eventual conflict with the United States.”

China, with that leverage, is obtaining permission to build in this hemisphere military installations that can be used to attack the American homeland or the U.S. military, should China launch its invasion of Taiwan, Japan, or some other target. China, for instance, is developing what looks like a naval base at the tip of Argentina, at strategic Tierra del Fuego.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The left’s control over the language of sexuality finally meets resistance By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on June 23rd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/the_lefts_control_over_the_language_of_sexuality_finally_meets_resistance.html

George Orwell taught us that control over the terms used to discuss consequential subjects is a key element of tyranny.  It’s a lesson that the left took to heart as a weapon, not as a caution against despotism.

No better example exists today than the language of sex, which the left has asserted control over, immensely assisted by its dominance of the major media organs.  Calling genital mutilation “gender-affirming care” is the most blatant example of bizarro-world terminology since calling abortion “reproductive health care” and its advocacy as “choice.”  Virtually the entire medical, academic, and journalistic establishments employ the term “gender-affirming care” now.  

But finally, there is a growing movement that has attracted at least one piece of critical support in fighting back.  It started yesterday with a grassroots tweet from a therapist named James Esses:

When his point was picked up and extended to policy at Twitter (at least according to its owner, Elon Musk), attention to the term exploded:

My understanding of the import of the term “cis-” is that it denies any status as normal to what has been normal since the dawn of human consciousness: people (and the animal kingdom) come in two varieties, male and female.[i] Thanks to modern science, we know that these two (and two only) varieties are determined by chromosomes, equally binary, XY and XX.

This exchange led to further tweets making the point that the origin of the terminology “cis-” is perversely connected with pedophilia.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Enduring Truths and Neglected Lessons: Kevin Donnelly

Posted By on June 23rd, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/06/enduring-truths-and-neglected-lessons/

Much of the debate surrounding schools and education centres on falling standards, teacher quality, school funding and what constitutes the most worthwhile curriculum and effective pedagogy. While such matters are important, more significant is the question: what constitutes the purpose of education? Given the rise of AI and chatbots and the fear humans will soon be replaced by computers, the question is even more urgent.

Illustrated by the cultural Left’s long march and prevalence of woke ideology in the nation’s classrooms, one answer is to use education as an instrument to overthrow what is depicted as an inherently racist, sexist, heteronormative capitalist society and to bring about the socialist utopia.

Throughout their schooling, students are indoctrinated with the belief that gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless, that males are inherently violent and misogynist and that Western civilisation is oppressive and guilty of white supremacism. Add the fact the world is about to end because of the climate change, that the arrival of the First Fleet led to genocide and there is nothing beneficial or redeeming about Australia’s development as a nation, and it’s no wonder young people suffer such high rates of anxiety and depression.

When Julia Gillard was education minister, she described herself as the minister for productivity. The focus is a utilitarian one where the purpose of education is to strengthen the economy and to ensure the nation has a highly skilled, globally competitive workforce. Associated with using schools to increase productivity is ensuring students are prepared for the uncertain, ever-changing world of the 21st century.  Knowledge is secondary to teaching generic competencies and skills like creativity, working in teams, critical thinking and embracing diversity and difference.

Ensuring education, especially in primary schools, is child-centred represents yet another approach to defining the purpose of education.  Re-badged as “personalised learning” and “student agency”, the belief is that learning only comes alive when it embraces the world of the child.

While each of the above models are distinctive, what they hold in common is the failure to address the essential role education plays in enculturation.  If societies are to survive and prosper and if individuals are to find meaning and purpose, each succeeding generation needs to be initiated into the broader culture.