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April 2019

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Earth Day Should Return to Its Roots By Henry I. Miller

By on April 25th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/25/earth-day-should-return-to-its-roots/

Last Monday, April 22, was Earth Day, a celebration conceived by then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson and first held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

In recent years, however, Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for professional environmental activists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, proselytize, and raise money to sustain the movement. In the cacophony of false narratives and “alternative facts,” provability often takes a back seat to plausibility.

And then there’s the mindless publicity-seeking. Consider this headline from the local CBS affiliate in Los Angeles: “Protesters Climb, Glue Themselves To Globe Outside Universal Studios To Mark Earth Day.” And just plain old mindlessness: In San Francisco, the sub-theme for the day was, “Celebrate the Green New Deal,” one of the most poorly conceived, destructive political proposals in recent memory.

The Earth Day Network, which organizes Earth Day events and advocacy, regularly distorts or ignores science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its anti-technology, anti-corporate, Big Government agenda. With a 2019 theme of “Protect Our Species,” this year’s event was no exception. Ironically, “our species” seems not to refer to us humans, homo sapiens, but only to the other species on the planet, which we are destroying.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Easter Car Attack In Nigeria Leaves Eight Christian Children Dead, Civilians Beat Suspects To Death

By on April 25th, 2019

https://teapartypac.org/easter-car-attack-in-nigeria-leaves-eight-christian-children-dead-civilians-beat-suspects-to-death/

“Police in Nigeria are investigating a road rage incident resulting in several deaths and injuries of children participating in an Easter Sunday parade after an angry driver allegedly plowed his car into the procession for blocking the road, several news outlets reported this week,” Breitbart reports.According to the BBC, “The driver, an off-duty security agent, was unhappy that the procession had blocked the road, some reports say.”The entire incident, in the northeastern town of Gombe in the state of the same name, ended with the death of 11 people and 30 more injured, mainly children.“No details have been released about the victims but the Boys Brigade members are aged between six and 22,” BBC revealed. However, according to The Cable, a Nigerian news outlet, at least eight of the fatalities were children.The children were members of the Christian group known as the Boys Brigade, which was holding an Easter Sunday procession.The driver was identified by authorities as Adamu Abdullahi, a member of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC). After running his car into the children, he was pulled out of the car and beaten to death by the crowd.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden’s Climate Test Will activist Democrats tolerate an effort to win back blue-collar workers? By James Freeman

By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-climate-test-11556220873

Former Vice President Joe Biden (D., Del.) is running for President again. And one of Donald Trump’s 2016 rivals thinks that Mr. Biden is the most formidable of the potential 2020 rivals.

The website Mediaite notes that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who ran against Mr. Trump in the last round of Republican primaries, sees a potential GOP problem in the Midwest:

“Someone who could give [Trump] a run is Joe Biden,” Christie said while on journalist Tina Brown‘s podcast TBD this week. “I say that is because in essence [the 2016] election was decided by 80,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and most of those voters were white working-class voters.”

“I think if you look at the 19 candidates on the other side of the aisle the one who can best have an opportunity to appeal to those white working-class voters is Joe Biden,” he added.

Seizing this opportunity will require, among other things, that Mr. Biden persuade such voters that although he sees climate change as an enormous threat, he doesn’t want to abolish the carbon economy that employs so many of them. He will also need to persuade Democratic activists to accept less than radical solutions.

Many of his rivals for the party’s nomination have already signed up for radicalism. Emissions abolitionists who have co-sponsored the “Green New Deal” include every one of the senators running for President. The proposal is not designed to appeal to working-class voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, though it promises government assistance for those it puts out of business. Last month, Jessica Chasmar reported in the Washington Times:

Big labor has come out swinging against the Green New Deal, with the AFL-CIO claiming the sweeping energy and economic reforms proposed by Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could cause “immediate harm to millions” of union workers.

The largest federation of unions in the country sent a letter to Mr. Markey and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez last week, saying the Green New Deal resolution makes promises that are “not achievable or realistic.”

This is the central tension within the Democratic party, with leaders presenting themselves as committed to both income equality and reduction of net greenhouse gas emissions ultimately to zero. Emitting industries are often champions of blue-collar wage gains.

Patrick Thomas reported this week in the Journal:

Oil-and-gas drillers and refiners had some of the highest-paid median workers in the energy and utility sectors in 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal analysis of annual pay disclosures for hundreds of big U.S. companies as provided by MyLogIQ.

Houston-based Phillips 66 paid its median worker $196,407, the highest of any company in the sector.

Phillips was followed by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. at $183,445.

Oil giant Exxon Mobil , which has roughly 72,600 employees, according to its latest proxy, had the third-highest median worker pay with $171,375.

As Mr. Biden seeks to win over people who mine, make and move stuff, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Donna Brazile says that blue-collar voters will be comfortable with the Obama-Biden environmental record. She notes the Paris climate accord and efforts to transition to alternative energy sources.

The Obama environmental agenda was not as ambitious as the Green New Deal’s overhaul of American society, but Mr. Obama’s government still issued record amounts of regulation. Economic growth was slow. And if blue-collar voters were satisfied with the Obama green agenda, why in 2016 did so many of them vote for a man who rejected it?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Drawing the Line, At Last A few university presidents have shown backbone and common sense against the hysterical demands of campus radicals.Heather Mac Donald

By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/free-speech-camille-paglia

To appreciate the significance of recent events at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, it helps to recall briefly some landmark moments in the College Administrator Hall of Shame.

Claremont McKenna College, October 2015: a Hispanic student writes a lachrymose oped denouncing Claremont’s “western, white, cisheternormative upper- to upper-middle class values” that, she says, make her and other minority admits feel out of place. The dean of students thanks the student for her oped and asks if she would be willing to meet with Claremont’s administrators to help them “better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” The phrase “not fitting the mold” was used by Claremont’s minority students themselves to describe their status; nevertheless, protests, hunger strikes, and marches engulf the campus, demanding the dean’s resignation for having described minority students as not fitting the school’s “mold.” The dean grovels before an angry group of students for over an hour, apologizing for her poor choice of words and promising to make amends. Claremont’s president Hiram Chodosh offers not one word of support for the dean, who soon resigns.

Yale, November 2015: a mob of minority students surrounds a respected Yale sociologist, Nicholas Christakis, and berates, screams, and curses at him for two hours. The students’ rage was triggered because Christakis’s wife, a child psychologist, had suggested in an email that Yale undergrads could choose their Halloween costumes without guidance from Yale’s diversity bureaucracy. One girl shrieks at Christakis: “Be quiet! . . . Who the fuck hired you? . . . You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” When Christakis meekly disagreed with another student’s claim that free speech allows “violence to happen on this campus,” the student shouts back: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not . . . It’s not a debate.” Four Yale diversity bureaucrats silently observed the professor’s scourging from the edges of the mob without coming to his defense.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Nutmeg Toll A proposal to levy fees on highway drivers is the latest example of Connecticut’s appetite for tax revenue.Ryan Fazio

By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/connecticut-highway-toll-proposal

Supported by 2018’s Blue Wave, Connecticut Democrats retained the governorship and large majorities in the state legislature. The national trend seems like the only explanation for their electoral success, considering the state’s dismal economic performance and chronic fiscal crisis during the prior eight years of unitary Democratic governance. After signing two of the largest tax hikes in state history, Dannel Malloy left office as the second-most unpopular governor in the nation. Even with the second-highest tax burden of any state, Connecticut has the second-highest unfunded pension liability in the U.S. The state economy remains smaller than before the financial crisis.

Democratic candidates for state office ran against President Trump and away from their own records. New governor Ned Lamont, though hardly a fresh face, campaigned with the slogan “the change starts now.” Democrats won state senate upsets in traditional Republican strongholds like Greenwich and Wilton, with candidates promising to be “a different kind of Democrat” or a “fiscal moderate.” The incumbent party won an ironic mandate for change.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Wars of Our Fathers Michael Dunn

By on April 25th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/anzac-2/2019/04/the-wars-of-our-fathers/

Family history sometimes surprises us into reflecting on larger historical and moral questions. On Anazac Day, like so many, I think about what my parents and grandparents did during the great wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45.

One of my grandfathers came out from Ireland around 1910 as a young doctor. He married here and his wife had a son in 1913. In 1915, he joined the army as a doctor and ended up serving in France until 1917 when he was sent home, honourably discharged, suffering from severe shell shock. Although he managed to set up a medical practice again, his health declined and he died six years later, leaving my grandmother to care for her newly-born second son and, of course, her older son, then ten years old. On the other side of the family, my other grandfather, a young mining engineer, also joined the Australian army. He too served in France, until an explosion so damaged his left arm that he had to sent to England to have it amputated. There he met my grandmother who had enlisted as a nurse, and they married on their return to Australia. In the 1939-45 war my father and his brother both served. My mother worked in the Army Department in Melbourne and her brother joined the RAAF.

The striking fact from these details is that everyone on both sides of the family joined the war effort if they could, voluntarily and out of a sense of personal duty. Their service was not exceptional in Australia, but from knowing more of the family history, I have come to better appreciate the importance of ANZAC Day.

Anzac Day commemorates and remembers service and sacrifice, not shallow triumphalism, perhaps because it first remembered duty done for our country, even in a campaign that failed. The war of 1914-18 caused enormous military casualties, killing mostly young men who would be so badly missed in the years of peace that followed. Many people still ask if that war was worth the price and if it was morally right? The same questions do not trouble us so much about the 1939-45 war, even though the casualties were higher and mainly civilian. This difference probably arises from the horror at what the Nazis did and how the Japanese army behaved in the countries it occupied. First World War atrocities did occur, but not on such a terrible scale.

However, at the start of both wars, nobody knew what atrocities were yet to come. Every citizen had to decide if he would fight for the cause. The fundamental moral question was plain to see. In each war, Germany had launched a war of aggression against its neighbours by invading the Low Countries, France, and then Russia (or the USSR). In launching such a war, Germany authorised and commanded its soldiers to go out and kill anybody who resisted and to seize or destroy any property as necessary.

In everyday life, such acts would be condemned as murder, wanton destruction and robbery. In exceptional times, the only allowable excuse for such violent acts is in reasonable self-defence, and only if carried out with care and restraint. Where there is that excuse, the use of force is then a positive moral obligation. It is part of an unspoken bond that obliges every citizen to do whatever they can, if the cause is just, to sacrifice comfort, property and life for our neighbours. Helping other nations to defend themselves is also a moral act. Of course, acting in self-defence requires a high standard of caution and care which is very hard to maintain once the dogs of war have been unleashed. No nation acted perfectly in carrying on these wars. As Australians, at least we can be grateful that in the battles at Anzac Cove and in France, as in the 1939-45 war, our country was fighting the aggressors. How much sadder and more solemn a day it would be if we had happened to be on the other side, now forced to reflect not only on our own losses but on the losses we inflicted on others.

Michael Dunn lives in Paris and wrote most recently for Quadrant Online of the Notre Dame fire

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Going Green and SocialismBy William R. Hawkins

By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/going_green_and_socialism.html

In response to New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s threat to make glass and steel skyscrapers “extinct” because “They have no place in our city or our Earth anymore,” the New York Post ran a cartoon depicting the mayor as Fred Flintstone presenting a building design made of rocks. A perfectly sound comment, given that those who proclaim themselves to be “progressives” are clearly rejecting the modern age and the true progress that has lifted humankind from millennia of abject poverty to abundance over the last few centuries. The process of advancement started in Western Europe with the rise of capitalism and has spread across the world. The process is not yet complete, as people even in the advanced nations still have unmet needs and desires. Indeed, the entire field of economics is based on the assumption that human wants are unlimited. The rise of the Green movement threatens to halt any further gains in material living standards and to roll back much of what has been accomplished since the Industrial Revolution.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

5 Times The Mueller Probe Broke Prosecutorial Rules That Ensure Justice There are rules against using the power and authority of a prosecutor to smear a defendant without giving him his day in court. by Adam Mill

By on April 25th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/25/5-times-mueller-probe-broke-prosecutorial-rules-ensure-justice/

CNN recently published an article arguing that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should not have issued a report suggesting the president may have committed obstruction of justice without actually reaching this conclusion. CNN is obviously disappointed because inside the leftist echo chamber the obstruction case seems undisputable.

For example, the Mueller report suggests that the president committed some kind of sin for wanting to fire former FBI director James Comey for being a party to the plot to blackmail or frame the president. Some believe presidents should fire FBI chiefs who participate in hoaxes against their boss.

Mueller did no favor to CNN’s client Democrats, who now face three terrible choices: (1) Impeach President Trump using their majority in the House, which will lead to a self-destructive trial in the Senate; (2) Drop it and move on in defiance of a rabid get-Trump base; or (3) use their majority in the House to drag the country through a Mueller 2.0 investigation, which runs the risk of distracting from Democratic messaging in the upcoming 2020 election.

Like Aesop’s scorpion on the frog’s back, the partisans on Mueller’s team just couldn’t help themselves. The Mueller report poisons public opinion without bringing charges. It should have been written on a postcard, because the outcome of a criminal proceeding is binary: Guilty or not guilty. There’s no middle ground under constitutional principles. President Trump is not guilty until the Senate convicts him otherwise.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Drove the Mueller Investigation? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-investigation-pious-hypocrisy/

Mueller’s team went down every blind alley relating to its investigation — except where Obama-era officials were likely culpable for relevant unethical or illegal behavior.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year, $30 million, 448-page report did not find collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.

Despite compiling private allegations of loud and obnoxious Trump behavior, Mueller also concluded that there was not any actionable case of obstruction of justice by the president. It would have been hard in any case to find that Trump obstructed Mueller’s investigation of an alleged crime.

One, there was never a crime of collusion. Mueller early on in his endeavors must have realized that truth, but he pressed ahead anyway. It is almost impossible to prove obstruction of nothing.

Two, Trump cooperated with the investigation. He waived executive privilege. He turned over more than 1 million pages of administrative documents. He allowed then–White House counsel Don McGahn to submit to over 30 hours of questioning by Mueller’s lawyers.

Three, anyone targeted by a massive investigation who knows he is innocent of an alleged crime is bound to become frustrated over a seemingly never-ending inquisition.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Free Speech in Denmark by Judith Bergman

By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14136/free-speech-denmark

What is shocking is that a state agency has threatened to remove a foster child from her only family, not because there is the slightest suspicion of ill-treatment of the child, but because of the foster mother’s exercising her freedom of speech.

“If people start to change their legal, democratic statements because somebody wants to hurt them or try to kill them, well, then we don’t have a democracy anymore. So, I am not at fault whatsoever that there is a threat to my person… We do not believe that assailants and murderers should decide where the limits of free speech should be….” — Rasmus Paludan, chairman of the Danish anti-Islam party, Stram Kurs.

The value at stake here is whether freedom of speech, regardless of what or whom it insults, can be guaranteed when it is met with violence and riots.

In Denmark, in recent weeks, the issue of free speech has figured prominently in the news.

This March, an outspoken critic of Islam, Jaleh Tavakoli, Danish-Iranian blogger and author of the book, Public Secrets of Islam, was threatened by the Social Supervisory Authority (Socialtilsyn Øst) that her foster-daughter would be removed from her care after Tavakoli shared an online video of the rape and murder by Islamic State terrorists in Morocco of two Scandinavian young women. She was informed in a letter that the government agency’s approval of her husband and her as foster parents — they had been raising the 8-year-old since she was a newborn baby — had been rescinded and that the girl might be taken away from them, as the authority did not consider them to “have the necessary quality to have children in your care.” The letter also said:

“As a generally approved foster family, one assumes a special task in relation to taking care of children with special needs, so that the family’s morality or ethics must not be questionable to any significant extent”.

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