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September 2018

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Obama’s slimy little Deep State environmental cabal is at it again By Monica Showalter

By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/obamas_slimy_little_deep_state_environmental_cabal_is_at_it_again.html

Under President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency grew to gargantuan proportions, issuing 4,000 regulations, adding more than 33,000 pages to the Federal Register, and dumping $50 billion in compliance costs on business, making itself one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in the U.S. government – quite a feat for an organization without a Cabinet seat.

With all that power, it was also famous for its incompetence and corruption, in that it had a problem obeying rules other people obeyed and always got away with it. Gold King Mine on the very yellow Animas River, anyone? That also applies to the behavior of its Obamaton leaders, who communicated with secret email accounts (remember Richard Windsor?) and got rewarded with fabulous Silicon Valley social media jobs in the revolving-door aftermath. They were amply augmented in their activities by the Obama State Department and the Obama National Security Council, which conducted business pretty much the same way.

Now it turns out this same corrupt bunch is at it again, in a new Competitive Enterprise Institute report called “Government for Rent,” put on by the respected Christopher C. Horner.

According to the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard:

A shadow government made up of former Obama climate change aides and funded by wealthy environmental advocates is supplementing liberal governors in an “off-the-books” operation to help them win approval of sweeping global warming changes and defy President Trump, according to a new investigative report.

In it’s [sic] “Government for Rent” report, the Competitive Enterprise Institute published dozens of emails detailing the scheme and the efforts by governments to have the activists draw up official state climate change agenda paid for by private donations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Doctors Are Performing Double Mastectomies On Healthy 13-Year-Old Girls Thirty-three of these girls were under 18 at the time of surgeries a taxpayer-funded researcher is studying to validate transgenderism. Two were only 13 years old, and five were only 14.By Jane Robbins !!!!!

By on September 12th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/12/u-s-doctors-performing-double-mastectomies-healthy-13-year-old-girls/

Some physicians in the United States are performing double mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls. The justification is gender dysphoria (“transgenderism”)—the girls now identify as boys and therefore want to look like boys.

Sometimes this dysphoria doesn’t appear until adolescence, and often little or no psychological evaluation is done to determine the underlying cause of the teenager’s desire to mutilate her body. But these doctors are willing to give her what she thinks she wants. And your federal tax money is paying for research to validate this gruesome treatment (see here and here).

Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.

As I’ve written with a coauthor, however, the study is fundamentally skewed toward the conclusions transgender activists desire: it contains no control group of subjects who will be spared these drugs, and will expire after five years, long before many negative effects may surface.

These design flaws aren’t surprising. Olson dismisses the possibility that gender dysphoria could be caused by psychological disturbance, claiming the only “mental health issue” related to gender dysphoria “comes from the way that the outside world responds” to the confused youth. She states, as though from a medical basis, that gender-dysphoric youth will go through the “wrong puberty” unless she and her cohorts can medicate them early enough in their lives to “put them through the right puberty.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe Features World Macron vs Salvini: the ideological battle for Europe’s future Personal antipathy between the two men is turning into a contest for European hearts and minds Christopher Caldwell

By on September 12th, 2018

https://spectator.us/2018/09/macron-salvini-battle-europes-future/

The first sign that Matteo Salvini was destined to do battle with Emmanuel Macron came in June, a few days after he was named Italy’s interior minister. Salvini, whose party, the League, wants to cut immigration drastically, announced that a German-registered rescue ship carrying 629 aspiring migrants from Africa would not be allowed to dock in Sicily.

Macron reacted with disgust. ‘The policy of the Italian government,’ a spokesman for his political movement announced, ‘is nauseating.’ Salvini responded that if the French wanted to show their open–heartedness, they might make good on their unfulfilled pledge to feed and shelter some of the 100,000 African migrants Italy had until recently been receiving each year.

This week, what had seemed like a personal antipathy between the two men revealed itself as an all-out battle for European hearts and minds. When Libyan rebels attacked government positions in Tripoli, threatening the agreements Italy has made with the Libyan coast guard to limit departures of migrants from the shores of North Africa, Salvini mused aloud to reporters. ‘There’s someone behind this,’ he said. ‘Someone who started a war [in 2011] that should never have been started, someone who calls for elections without sounding out his allies and the people on the ground, someone who tries to force the issue by exporting democracy, which never works.’ He urged journalists eager to know what he meant by that to ‘ask Paris’.

Days earlier, Salvini had invited the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to Milan to issue a manifesto. It was Orbán who exhorted Europe to harden its borders during the great overland migration from war-torn Syria and points east in 2015. Standing under the awning of a pizzeria in Milan, Orbán singled out Salvini as ‘my hero and my comrade in destiny’. And he singled out Macron as his nemesis. ‘There are two camps in Europe,’ Orbán said, ‘and one is headed by Macron. He is at the head of the political forces supporting immigration. On the other hand, we want to stop illegal immigration.’

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Memo to the Washington Post: In Europe, Criticism of Multiculturalism Is Mainstream By Douglas Murray

By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/washington-post-europe-multiculturalism-criticism/

Thank you, Rich for alerting me to the latest activities at the Washington Post. If it hadn’t had been for NR’s editor, I wouldn’t have noticed that the Washington Post tried to take me out as collateral in the truck they’re trying to drive at Ron DeSantis. I wouldn’t have noticed, not only because like most people I don’t read the Washington Post, but because the paper didn’t even have the guts to name me as they tried to run me over on their way towards the GOP’s candidate for Florida governor.

One of DeSantis’s crimes is apparently that he once spoke at a conference in Florida which also featured: “a critic of multiculturalism who has written that ‘Europe is committing suicide’ by welcoming large numbers of refugees and immigrants.”

The link in the article makes clear that they are talking about me. And what amazing detective work on the part of the Post. How did they discover my views? When I published my book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, I hoped that it would slip by unnoticed. I had planned that nobody would read it or discover what I thought of the migration crisis of 2015. To my chagrin, the work became an instant bestseller in the U.K. and across Europe and was sold by the tonne in the U.S. as well. It has been praised by politicians across the political spectrum, and by the end of this year will have been translated into more than 20 different languages.

So I’m glad the Post’s sleuths are on to my secretive and clandestine work. Although it’s clear from their descriptor that the paper’s correspondents haven’t read the book themselves. Just another demonstration of a problem that papers like the Washington Post now have — which is that their readers too often appear to know more than their writers.

In any case — it might be worth making a response to the Post’s idea of investigative journalism. There are many odd presumptions in Beth Reinhard and Emma Brown’s article. One is that the authors think that speaking at a conference that has also hosted James Damore or Ben Shapiro is somehow embarrassing or way-out-there. Another is that the school of journalism known as “I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl who’s danced with the Prince of Wales” is a devastating journalistic tactic, rather than one signifier of an ultra-partisan hit-job in which the facts have been found to fit the politics of the authors.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Wall Street Journal Runs Editorial from Erdogan—World’s Biggest Jailer of Journalists By Patrick Poole

By on September 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/wall-street-journal-runs-editorial-from-worlds-biggest-jailer-of-journalists/

One-third of all journalists jailed worldwide sit in the prisons of Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

So it’s startling that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has opened up its opinion page to him today.

Remarkably, this comes after Turkey imprisoned WSJ reporter Dion Nissenbaum for two and a half days in December 2016, refusing to allow him to contact his colleagues or his family and later deporting him.

Then in October 2017, the Turkish regime convicted WSJ reporter Ayla Albayrak in absentia on charges of publishing “terrorist propaganda.”

And just today the Erdogan regime arrested another Western journalist:
Austrian journalist arrested in Turkey
Max Zirngast, an Austrian journalist, was detained by “anti-terror” authorities in Ankara according to one of the magazines he worked for. The report said he’d likely been detained for “political publications.”

Today’s Erdogan op-ed follows another New York Times op-ed by the Turkish dictator just a month ago — published on the same day the NYT editorial board questioned whether Turkey was still an American ally.

The bizarre love affair of the American corporate media continues as 169 journalists sit in Turkish prisons. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Anti-Trump Leakers Moved From Offense to Defense By Lee Smith

By on September 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/how-anti-trump-leakers-moved-from-offense-to-defense/

A trail of evidence appearing in major news outlets suggests a campaign to undermine President Trump from within the government through illegal leaks of classified information, and then thwart congressional investigators probing the disclosures.

On Monday the Justice Department released a handful of texts and other documents that included two former officials known for their anti-Trump bias – Peter Strzok and Lisa Page of the FBI – discussing the DOJ’s “media leak strategy.” Strzok now says, through his lawyer, that that strategy was aimed at preventing leaks. Nevertheless, days later he and Page approvingly mention forthcoming news articles critical of Trump associates.

“The leaks that have been coming out of the FBI and DOJ since 2016 are unconscionable,” said retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano. “There’s a difference between whistleblowing and leaking for self-serving or partisan purposes.”

Past and present U.S. officials say the template for the leak campaign can be traced back to the Obama administration’s efforts to sell the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which made the press reliant on background conversations and favorable leaks from government officials. Obama adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times in 2016 that “we created an echo chamber” that “helped retail the administration’s narrative.”

“That same configuration,” said Michael Doran, a senior official in the George W. Bush White House, “the press, political operatives, newly minted experts, social media validators—was repurposed to target Trump, his campaign, transition team, then presidency.” The echo chamber’s primary instrument in attacking the current White House, said Doran, “is the Russia collusion narrative.”

RCI has found that the anti-Trump leaks fall into two broad categories, or phases. Initially the leaking was an offensive operation aimed at disrupting Trump’s agenda, especially through leaks alleging connections between his campaign and the Russians. Its early successes included leaks of highly classified material that led to the firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from overseeing that probe.

The second phase – which began roughly a year into the Trump administration – has been more defensive, pushing back against congressional oversight committees that had uncovered irregularities in the FBI’s investigation of Trump. This phase has been marked by the willingness of press outlets to run stories backing off earlier reported leaks that proved to be deeply misleading – including the roots of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and the relationship between Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr and the opposition research firm that produced a central document of that probe, the largely discredited “Steele dossier.”

This second phase has also included articles and opinion pieces – some written by journalists who have published classified information – dismissing suspicions of an orchestrated campaign against Trump as, to use the phrase invoked in a recent New Yorker article, a “conspiracy theory.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Kerry Would Sue Trump for ‘the Lives That Will be Lost’ Due to Climate Change By Nicholas Ballasy

By on September 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kerry-would-sue-trump-for-the-lives-that-will-be-lost-due-to-climate-change/

WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State John Kerry, author of Every Day is Extra, predicted that “lives will be lost” due to President Trump’s position on climate change, calling his time in office a matter of “life and death.”

“This is why it’s the anecdote to what Bob Woodward lays out [in his new book Fear: Trump in the White House]. This book describes how we accept and fight, many times unsuccessfully, more times successfully, to make our democracy work and never had we needed to do that more than right now. We’re in trouble,” Kerry said about his memoir during a discussion at the Carnegie Center for International Peace on Monday evening.

“I don’t try to be a troublemonger or to be somebody who tries to scare people, but I’m telling you folks – and I write about this in the last chapter of the book – I mean, I wish I could find legal standing to bring a case against Donald Trump for the lives that will be lost and the property that will be damaged and the billions of dollars because of his decision on climate change. This is life and death. Our democracy matters that much,” he added.

Kerry also criticized Trump’s handling of relations with North Korea and Europe.

“What is happening is the sloppiness of the diplomacy that is going on with Kim Jong-un, the sloppiness of his reckless statements in Europe at a time when Europe is already weakened somewhat, and it matters to us more than ever since the end of World War II. I mean, these things matter, enormously, and we’ve got to fight for them,” he said.

Kerry recalled the “huge division” in the country when he stood up against former President Nixon during the Vietnam War.

“I was arrested for civil disobedience and demonstrating against the war, so it was divisive and I certainly earned some enemies for a lifetime through that experience. And we saw some of them come to the forefront in ’04, that’s what that was about,” Kerry said, referring to the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ads that aired during his presidential run in 2004. “That wasn’t about my record. It was about them being angry I opposed the war and told the truth.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Trump’s energy policies are driving Democrats crazy by Rupert Darwall

By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/trumps-energy-policies-are-driving-democrats-crazy

The EPA’s recently announced Affordable Clean Energy rule, replacing former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, is the most significant shift towards energy sanity in more than a decade. And it’s driving Democrats crazy.

President Trump’s new rule finally swings the pendulum back from the moment in 2007 when former President George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act. The absurd aim of that bill was to replace oil from the ground with energy grown from plants.

California governor Jerry Brown, whose state is legislating for 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, blasted the rule change, calling it ” A declaration of war against America and all of humanity.” Delaware Democratic Sen. Tom Carper said it would send clean energy jobs to China, oblivious to the reality that Democrats’ war on coal is already doing exactly that.

Climate scientists are also losing their minds. Forget the Mueller probe, Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, blogged. There is no doubting the Trump administration’s complicity in a much more serious offense – “the failure to acknowledge, address and mitigate the risks of human-caused climate change.”

But Santer got his facts wrong. There’s no scientific disagreement. The impact assessment accompanying the affordable energy rule does indeed acknowledge that greenhouse gas emissions impose costs on society. The new rule’s real and important change is that it finally constrains the scope of power station emissions regulation to within current law.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Time to Add Entrepreneurship to the College Curriculum By Justin Dent

By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/09/12/time_to_add_entrepreneurship_to_the_college_curriculum_110794.html

Colleges across the country have welcomed millions back to campus over the past few weeks in the midst of headlines heralding economic growth. Faculty, administrators, and student leaders should seize this opportunity to prioritize entrepreneurship and add it to the core curriculum. Entrepreneurship is the only skill that can give students true financial and occupational freedom in today’s fast-changing economy.

Sadly, American universities have long prioritized theory and knowledge at the expense of implementation and practice.

Few of today’s curricula — even in the “hard” disciplines such as science and technology — translate directly to the job market. According to a recent PayScale survey of more than 64,000 managers, 60 percent responded that recent grads lack critical thinking skills, nearly half responded that they didn’t have the necessary writing or leadership skills, and over a third said that they didn’t have adequate data analysis skills. In other words, around half of college grads don’t have the baseline attributes it takes to succeed in today’s economy — let alone flourish as entrepreneurs.

As a result, there are significant cracks in today’s generally strong economy. For instance, there are still vast geographic inequities in economic growth, a lack of economic vibrancy, and widespread underemployment.

A recent Wall Street Journal article dubbed small communities “the new inner city” because of their stubbornly poor socioeconomic indicators that are often apparent even from a casual drive through town.

The startup rate, a widely used proxy for economic vibrancy, is one of the few economic indicators to show little-to-no improvement since the Great Recession.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s ‘Digital’ Totalitarian Experiment :Gordon Chang

By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12988/china-social-credit-system

China’s “social credit” system, which will assign every person a constantly updated score based on observed behaviors, is designed to control conduct by giving the ruling Communist Party the ability to administer punishments and hand out rewards. The former deputy director of the State Council’s development research center says the system should be administered so that “discredited people become bankrupt”.
Officials prevented Liu Hu, a journalist, from taking a flight because he had a low score. According to the Communist Party-controlled Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips.
Chinese officials are using the lists for determining more than just access to planes and trains. “I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” Liu said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”
Chinese leaders have long been obsessed with what Jiang Zemin in 1995 called “informatization, automation, and intelligentization,” and they are only getting started Given the capabilities they are amassing, they could, the argument goes, make defiance virtually impossible. The question now is whether the increasingly defiant Chinese people will accept President Xi’s all-encompassing vision.

By 2020, Chinese officials plan to have about 626 million surveillance cameras operating throughout the country. Those cameras will, among other things, feed information into a national “social credit system.”

That system, when it is in place in perhaps two years, will assign to every person in China a constantly updated score based on observed behaviors. For example, an instance of jaywalking, caught by one of those cameras, will result in a reduction in score.

Although officials might hope to reduce jaywalking, they seem to have far more sinister ambitions, such as ensuring conformity to Communist Party political demands. In short, the government looks as if it is determined to create what the Economist called “the world’s first digital totalitarian state.”

That social credit system, once perfected, will surely be extended to foreign companies and individuals.

At present, there are more than a dozen national blacklists, and about three dozen various localities have been operating experimental social credit scoring systems. Some of those systems have failed miserably. Others, such as the one in Rongcheng in Shandong province, have been considered successful.

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