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Ruth King

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE CLIMATE CONFEDERACY

By on June 17th, 2017

After President Trump rejected the Paris Climate treaty, which had never been ratified by the Senate, the European Union announced that it would work with a climate confederacy of secessionist states. Scotland and Norway’s environmental ministers have mentioned a focus on individual American states. And the secessionist governments of California, New York and Washington have announced that they will unilaterally and illegally enter into a foreign treaty rejected by the President of the United States.

The Constitution is very clear about this. “No state shall enter into any treaty.” Governor Cuomo of New York has been equally clear. “New York State is committed to meeting the standards set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible actions.”

Cuomo’s statement conveniently comes in French, Chinese and Russian translations.

“It is a little bold to talk about the China-California partnership as though we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” Governor Brown of California announced.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the radical leftist described California as “a real nation-state”.

Brown was taking a swing through China to reassure the Communist dictatorship of California’s loyalty to an illegal treaty at the same time as EU boss Juncker was bashing America and kissing up to Premier Li Keqiang at the EU-China summit. It’s one thing when the EU and China form a united front against America. It’s quite another when California and China form a united front against America.

The Climate Alliance of California, New York, Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Virginia and Rhode Island looks a lot like the Confederacy’s Montgomery Convention. Both serve as meeting points for a secessionist alliance of states to air their grievances against the Federal government over an issue in which they are out of step with the nation.

“We’re a powerful state government. We have nine other states that agree with us,” Brown boasted.

Two more and Jim Jones’ old pal could have his own confederacy.

All the bragging and boasting about how much wealth and power the secessionist states of the climate confederacy represent sounds very familiar. But that wealth and power is based around small enclaves, the Bay Area and a few dozen blocks in Manhattan, which wield disproportionate influence.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Top MIT Scientist: Dr. Richard Lindzen -“Global Warming Science Is ‘Propaganda’”

By on June 17th, 2017

A leading MIT scientist claims that global warming science is based on pure propaganda, and that the “97 percent consensus” statistic is false.

According to Dr. Richard Lindzen, most scientists do not agree that CO2 emissions are the cause for climate change.

Dailycaller.com reports: “It was the narrative from the beginning,” Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told RealClear Radio Hour host Bill Frezza Friday. “In 1998, [NASA’s James] Hansen made some vague remarks. Newsweek ran a cover that says all scientists agree. Now they never really tell you what they agree on.”

“It is propaganda,” Lindzen said. “So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2, you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming.”

“But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce CO2,” he added.

Lindzen if referring to the often cited statistic among environmentalists and liberal politicians that 97 percent of climate scientists agree human activities are causing the planet to warm. This sort of argument has been around for decades, but recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook.

Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.

A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.

“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author.

A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points.

“Almost everybody involved in the climate debate, including the majority of sceptics, accepts these propositions, so little can be learned from the Cook et al. paper,” wrote Montford. “The extent to which the warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century was man-made and the likely extent of any future warming remain highly contentious scientific issues.”

Despite the dubious nature of the consensus, liberal politicians used the figure to bolster their calls for policies to fight global warming. President Barack Obama even cited the Cook paper while announcing sweeping climate regulations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THE COMEY GAP: MARK LANGFAN

By on June 17th, 2017

Everybody over 56 years old likely remembers the 18 ½ minute gap in Richard Nixon’s White House Watergate tapes after Nixon had ordered erasures to hide things he said concerning Watergate. In the current Comey craze of testimony, there’s a 105 ½ hour gap in James Comey’s testimony that proves that critical parts of Comey’s testimony is at best materially false, and, at worst, highly perjurious with the intent of committing crimes against the United States.

That 105 ½ hour gap is the time between when President Trump on Friday morning “tweeted” that “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” and when Comey alleged in his recent Senate Intelligence Committee testimony that he “woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation.”

Between 9:32 Friday morning and let’s guess 3 am that next Monday night, there are approximately 105 and ½ hours. In short, Comey’s Senate testimony states that it took James B. Comey, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the United States of America, 105 ½ hours after President Trump’s “tapes” tweet to realize “that there might be corroboration” of his memos. This is so ludicrous that it exposes his entire testimony as a web of perjury.

As a preface, this essay is not going to vet the already reported grave chronology inconsistency in Comey’s “memo” testimony.

Instead, first, let’s examine the exact documentary record regarding this 105 ½ hour gap.

President Trump’s tweet at 8:26 AM on 12 May 2017 read:

“James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Next, James B. Comey, Jr.’s Senate Intelligence Committee testimony under Republican Senator Susan Collins read as follows:

“COLLINS: And finally, did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside of the Department of Justice?

COMEY: Yes.

COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?

COMEY: I asked – the president tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there’s no tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.

And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.

COLLINS: And was that Mr. Wittes?

COMEY: No, no.

COLLINS: Who was that?

COMEY: A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia Law School.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The lawyers’ civil war Trump is under siege by shock troops from the left and right – an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny David Goldman

By on June 17th, 2017

US President Donald Trump and former FBI Director James Comey: Did Trump fire Comey because he showed insufficient zeal in uncovering the pattern of press leaks. Photo: Reuters file

The distinguished political scientist Angelo Codevilla coined the ominous term “cold civil war” to describe America’s precarious condition, adding, “Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot.” The attempted massacre June this week June 14 of Republican Congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers.

A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican Establishment wants to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice. By means yet undisclosed, the mutineers forced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from office and now seek to bring down the president for allegedly obstructing an investigation of Gen. Flynn that arose in the first place from the entrapment scheme.

One of the Republican Party’s most distinguished statesmen recently told a closed gathering that a “cold coup” is underway against the president. I do not know and have not sought to learn the substance of the allegations; Gen. Flynn has no choice as a matter of self-preservation but to hold his peace and presently cannot defend himself in public.

By no coincidence is Gen. Flynn the central character in this scenario. As I wrote in February, the CIA really is out to get him:

Flynn’s Defense Intelligence Agency produced a now-notorious 2012 report warning that chaos in Syria’s civil war enabled the rise of a new Caliphate movement, namely ISIS. For full background, see Brad Hoff’s July 2016 essay in Foreign Policy Journal: Flynn humiliated the bungling CIA and exposed the incompetence and deception of the Obama administration, and got fired for it. If anyone doubts the depth of CIA incompetence in Syria, I recommend an account that appeared this month in the London Financial Times.

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Let’s not emulate the Left : Ruthie Blum

By on June 16th, 2017

As soon as details about the shooting spree at a baseball field in Virginia on Wednesday morning began to emerge, social media lit up with political arguments.

Before it was established that 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson had arrived at the venue with the intention to kill members of the Republican Party, the heated debate focused on the assault rifle and pistol used in the attack, and the pros and cons of gun control. When the identity and motive of the perpetrator became clear, the fights took a turn for the worse.

Conservatives experienced a touch of schadenfreude at the realization that the perpetrator was a left-wing activist — a supporter of Bernie Sanders, the candidate in the Democratic Party’s primaries defeated by Hillary Clinton — with boundless hatred for U.S. President Donald Trump. Until now, the Right in America has been put on the defensive, accused of everything from racism to wanton disregard for the environment. That Hodgkinson was a member of the “enlightened” camp, which not only purports to have a monopoly on goodness, but considers gun ownership a crime in and of itself, was a source of deep embarrassment.

Sanders promptly and properly denounced the violence and distanced himself from the culprit.

Trump and members of Congress, many of whom were present during the shootings, also have been acting responsibly. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced, “We are united in our shock. We are united in our anguish. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

Facebook and Twitter users have been less noble, with Trump supporters attributing the truly vile atmosphere created by disgruntled voters, particularly prominent celebrities, to Hodgkinson’s rampage. They have been highlighting statements such as the one made by movie star Robert De Niro, who said in a pre-presidential election video that he’d “like to punch Trump in the face,” and the disgusting shenanigans of comedian Kathy Griffin, recently disgraced for parodying an Islamic State-like beheading of the president.

Though these critics are justifiably appalled at the escalating viciousness of anti-Trump rhetoric — which is aimed not only at the president himself, but at anyone who defends him — they need to be very careful when it comes to castigating an entire political camp for the actions of a deranged man with a history of physical abuse.

One key principle that sets conservatives apart from liberals is individualism. This is why we tend to support a free market, free speech and school choice, while rejecting the notion that fast-food chains cause obesity or that guns commit murder. This is not to say that we ignore the power of culture on society. On the contrary, it is the source of much of our angst and the cause of many of our ideological battles.

However, as a right-winger in Israel whose political position was held accountable for the climate that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995, I cannot in good conscience join the choir of my current American compatriots doing to the other side what was done to mine.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Lights Out for the West The backlash against liberalism is rooted in economics. While the rich live in opulence, over half of Westerners are barely getting by. Lawrence J. Haas reviews “The Retreat of Western Liberalism” by Edward Luce.

By on June 16th, 2017

In the 1990s, Western liberalism’s triumph seemed inevitable. The Soviet empire had disintegrated. Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the “end of history.” By the end of the decade, the U.S. economy was surging, fueling higher living standards at every income level. More and more countries were seeking to establish the liberal political and economic systems that would allow them to share in the prosperity. At home and abroad, the future seemed bright, almost boundless.

In hindsight, however, the 1990s look less like the ascent of Western liberalism than its heyday. As it turned out, the late ’90s represented the only period since the early 1970s in which Americans enjoyed the benefits of economic growth so broadly; for more than four decades, with the exception of those at the top of the wealth distribution, incomes have remained mostly stagnant. Around the world, since the turn of the millennium, some 25 democracies have failed, and movements to liberalize—most notably, the Arab Spring—have generally ended in violent collapse.

In 2016, simmering fear and frustration boiled over as American voters elected a political outsider who expressed no interest in promoting the U.S.-led liberal order. And while optimists view Donald Trump as a historical accident, British journalist Edward Luce begs to differ. In “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” he warns that Trumpism could prove less an accident than a portent in the United States and across the West.

“Western liberalism” can be a mushy term, and even though his book is premised on it, Mr. Luce offers no clear definition. He instead points to elements that, one presumes, are supposed to add up to a whole—texts like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the belief in democracy in the hearts of Westerners and the spread of democratic systems over time. Whatever this whole is, Mr. Luce sees it under assault. America has elected an essentially illiberal president who is “a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin. ” Overseas, democratic capitalism’s broken promises have made the quick-fix pledges of demagogues more appealing. Britain’s “left-behinds” voted against the London elite and opted for Brexit; right-wing autocrats mounted serious campaigns in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere across Europe (albeit with mixed success). In every year since 2008 more countries have restricted freedom than have expanded it, according to the global watchdog organization Freedom House.Mr. Luce devotes much of his book to why this global rebellion is happening, and why now. His thesis is straightforward. While the rich enjoy greater opulence, living and working among themselves in isolated enclaves, half to two-thirds of Westerners have been “treading water—at best—for a generation” as globalization and robotics have combined to limit wages and eliminate jobs. Productivity growth fueled the economic surge that doubled living standards from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, but the productivity gains that the digital revolution was supposed to deliver haven’t materialized. Meanwhile, the costs of health insurance and higher education—both essential to upward mobility—have continued to rise, putting them increasingly out of reach of the classes that would benefit from them most and making social stratification more pronounced.

How does this growing inequality affect the liberal project? “Liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth,” Mr. Luce argues. “When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolised by a fortunate few, things turn nasty.” Across the West, Mr. Luce explains, the non-rich losers in this zero-sum game have started to turn against the status quo. For the United States, Mr. Luce cites as evidence the fact that “every single one of America’s 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton. The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small-town, went for Donald Trump.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Should Stop Funding Palestinian Terrorists By Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on June 16th, 2017

When it comes to the Palestinians, the Trump administration goes the way its predecessors have. On June 13, 2017, State Secretary Rex Tillerson reassured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Palestinian Authority “have changed that policy and their intent is to cease the payments to the families of those who have committed murder or violence against others.”

Tillerson apparently took Mahmoud Abbas at his word. He should know better.
The Palestinian leadership’s “intentions” have been declared in public by Palestinian Authority (PA) Yasser Arafat on June 6, 2001, on Radio Palestine. “War is a dream; peace is a nightmare,” he announced. Arafat is gone, but in the effort to avoid the “nightmare” of peace, Abbas and the rest of the Palestinian leadership adopted his motto and never stopped funding its jihadist propaganda for terrorism against Israel.

In 2003, Palestinian President Abbas, who then served as Arafat’s prime minister, justified PA’s Treasury payments to members of the terrorist designated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – who committed mass-murder attacks on Israelis and groomed children to become suicide bombers – was an effort to “de-radicalize” the terrorists. It was “an attempt to wean the terrorist from committing further homicide bombings,” Abbas said. But then, as today, the PA did not pay to stop terrorism; it has been paying the salaries of terrorists and rewarding their families. The Palestinian’s “de-radicalization” excuse, was later adopted by the Saudis and the other Gulf States to host al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters. The Palestinians should also be credited for “innovations” such as suicide bombing, stabbing, and car-ramming. And terrorism proved as a good industry for the Palestinians. The more terror, the more funds they were given supposedly to incentivize them for “peace.”

On July 17, 2003, after the European Union was criticized for funding Palestinian terrorism, then External Relations Commissioner, Christopher Patten, wrote in the Financial Times “[the EU has worked throughout the bloodstained months of the intifada to keep a Palestinian administration alive and to drive a process of reform within it.” Similar claims have become routine over the years, and the money kept flowing. Patten claimed, “At every step, the EU’s help was made conditional on reforms that would make a viable Palestinian state a reality one day and in the short term make the Palestinian territories a better, safer neighbor for Israel.” By the time Patten made this statement, he had received from the Israeli government volumes of captured Palestinian documents providing clear evidence that EU funds granted to the PA were being used to pay for the upkeep of terrorists, homicide bombers, weapons, bomb manufacturing plants, as well vacations, travel, scholarships and medical treatments to members the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other Palestinian terror groups, and bonuses to the Palestinian leadership and their families, including Arafat and Abbas.

If for no other reason, the U.S. the EU, the UN, the World Bank, other international and even Christian charities should have stopped funding the PA for its ongoing human, civil and religious rights violations against their own people. Some of this abuse has been carried out through the introduction of the Islamic culture that encourages martyrdom in the name of Allah. To fool the West, the Palestinians have always said, in English, they are peace-loving people.
On June 14, a day after Tillerson assured the Senate the PA promised to change its spots, the head of the Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs, Issa Qaraqe challenged the Secretary’s statement: “There is no end to the payments. We reject ending the subsidies to the prisoners and families of martyrs. We will not apologize for it,” he said and went on to denounce the American and Israelis

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No Tolerance for Extremism by Denis MacEoin

By on June 16th, 2017

At the moment, the bar for taking extremists out of circulation is set ridiculously high. People known for their own extremism that reaches pre-terrorist levels should not be walking the streets when they have expressed support for Islamic State (ISIS) or tried to head to Syria or called for the destruction of Britain and other democracies or allied themselves to people already in prison. Their demand for free speech or freedom of belief must never be elevated above the rights of citizens to live safely in their own towns and cities. It is essential for parliament to lower the bar.

Is this to be the political landscape for the future, where groups of people demanding death and destruction are given the freedom of the streets whilst those wishing to hold a peaceful celebration are prevented from doing so?

To see extremist Islam as a “perversion” of Islam misses an important point. The politically correct insistence that radical versions of Islam somehow pervert an essentially peaceful and tolerant faith forces policy-makers and legislators, church leaders, rabbis, interfaith workers and the public at large to leave to one side an important reality. Flatly, Islam in its original and classic forms has everything to do with today’s radicals and the violence they commit. The Qur’an is explicit in its hatred for pagans, Jews and Christians. It calls for the fighting of holy war (jihad) to conquer the non-Muslim world, subdue it, and gradually bring it into the fold of Islam. Islam has been at war with Europe since the seventh century.

On the Sunday morning after the terrorist attacks in London the night of June 3, British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed the nation in a powerful speech. It deserves to be read in full, but several points stand out and call for a response.

We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change and they need to change in four important ways.

First, while the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism.

It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam.

Lower down, she enhances that by saying:

Second, we cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide.

No one who has watched the endless stream of radical Muslim preachers who appear on YouTube or who post extremist, anti-Western, anti-democratic, or anti-Semitic opinions on Facebook would object to May’s stricture. But given earlier attempts to rein in the providers of so many internet spaces in a demand for better scrutiny and the removal of radicalizing material from their sites, we must remain pessimistic about how far May or any other Western leader can bring effective pressure to bear. Without strong financial disincentives, these rulers of the internet will pay little heed to the concerns of the wider public and our security services.

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Baltimore Nears 160 Homicides So Far in 2017, Six in Less Than 24 Hours “Gunfire is reaching epic proportions.” Trey Sanchez

By on June 16th, 2017

According to CBS Baltimore, the city is nearing 160 homicides and already before halfway through 2017. Shockingly, six people were murdered in the span of just 24 hours.

Because of the increase in violent crimes, Baltimore officers have been given mandatory 12-hour shifts where they will go door-to-door, canvassing the neighborhoods where most of the violence is taking place.

Baltimore has been troubled since the Black Lives Matter riots over the death of Freddie Gray who died in police custody. Then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was criticized for bowing to the rioters who injured police officers, giving those “who wished to destroy” the space to do so.

Inheriting that mess is Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh, who said illegal guns are the city’s biggest problem now.

“It should at least be a felony to carry an illegal gun,” Pugh said. “There’s too many illegal guns on streets of our city.”

Pugh is working to ensure criminals with violent backgrounds stay in jail and can’t get their hands on firearms.

Among the nearly 160 dead is 27-year-old Sebastian Dvorak, who was robbed and gunned down while out with his friends. His killer is still on the run.

Then there was the 37-year-old mother of eight children, Charmaine Wilson, who was murdered after a fight between a group of boys over a bike that belonged to one of her sons. Her killer hasn’t been found, either.

Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith said, “There is a murderer among us who is an absolutely monstrous human being. This is something that should outrage the entire community, entire city, because there are cowards walking around that took this mother, killed a woman over a dispute.”

Police are asking for tips or video to help in locating these suspects.

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Father Of Otto Warmbier: Obama Admin Told Us To Keep Quiet, Trump Admin Brought Him Home Posted By Tim Hains

By on June 16th, 2017

The father of Otto Warmbier, an American college student imprisoned in North Korea until this week, speaks about his experience working with the Trump administration to free his son. He delivered a short press conference at his local high school in Wyoming, OH Thursday morning.

FRED WARMBIER: When Otto was first taken, we were advised by the past administration to take a low profile while they worked to obtain his release. We did so without result. Earlier this year, Cindy and I decided the time for strategic patience was over.

We made a few media appearances and traveled to Washington to meet with [Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Korea and Japan] Ambassador Joe Yun at the State Department.

It is my understanding that Ambassador Yun and his team, at the direction of the president aggressively pursued resolution of the situation.

They have our thanks for bringing him home.

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