Displaying the most recent of 90914 posts written by

Ruth King

The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin Mainstream news sources exposed their own long-held biases through their extended meltdown over Trump. By Victor Davis Hanson

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists.

What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.

No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.

Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.

When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.

The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, Communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned.

That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the Internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.

Soft-spoken liberal hosts on public TV and radio superficially sounded more news-like than their gravelly-voiced populist counterparts on commercial radio and cable news.

Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.

Homogenization of Temperature Data By the Bureau of Meteorology by Brendan Godwin

I worked for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM for 2 years from 1973 to 1975. I was trained in weather observation and general meteorology. I spent 1 year observing Australia’s weather and 1 year observing the weather at Australia’s Antarctic station at Mawson.

As part of it’s Antarctic program, Australia drills ice cores at Law Dome near it’s Casey station. On our return journey in 1975 we repatriated a large number of ice cores for scientific analysis. The globe’s weather and climate records are stored in these ice cores for the past 1 million years approximately.

Australia’s Antarctic program went by the name of Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition or ANARE for short. This is now known as Australian Antarctic Division or AAD. Returned expeditions formed a club called the ANARE Club of which I have been a member since 1975. Members have many functions and reunions and they have a reunion dinner every year. At this dinner there has always been guest speakers from Australia’s Antarctic Division. These guest speakers are usually someone of the caliber of the Divisions Chief Scientist or the Operations Manager and the talks are designed to keep members updated on the Antarctic scientific program.

The annual dinner is also a place where members keep in touch with each other and network and this communication continues throughout the year via email.
The International Panel on Climate Change – IPCC

The IPCC was created by and is a joint 50/50 partnership between the World Meteorological Organisation – WMO and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It has extremely narrow terms of reference in that it’s role is to determine that humans are causing global warming. In that regard it is only looking at human induced forcings over the past 150 years, just to make sure it reaches that result. That makes it a political body with a political agenda.
World Meteorological Organisation – WMO

The WMO has structurally changed since 1974. Today it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. When I went through training with the BOM, the WMO had a shared global headquarters between Melbourne, New York, Moscow and London. I don’t know when this structure changed. Australia had a leading role in the WMO and was a dissemination point for weather data.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM

BOM’s headquarters are in Melbourne. Australia has claim to 5.9 million square kilometres, about 42% of Antarctica. That claim is on hold while the Antarctic Treaty is in place. On the Antarctic continent Australia has 3 full time stations, Mawson, Davis and Casey, as well as a 4th, Macquarie Is., in the Southern Ocean. BOM has a full time presence on all these stations. Weather data is collected throughout the day and night at all these stations. At Mawson in 1974, we collected not only our own data but all the weather data from Davis, the Japanese station at Syowa and the Russian station at Molodezhnaya. Mawson sent all this data to the Overseas Telecommunications Commission – OTC in Sydney where it was forwarded on to BOM in Melbourne. A second Russian station, Mirny, was collected by Casey and forwarded on the BOM Melbourne via OTC.

BOM used this data, in conjunction with all the observational data obtained from all the weather stations and observational points throughout Australia, as part of Australia’s weather maps and forecasting. Additionally, Melbourne was the WMO distribution point for all weather data in our region. BOM Melbourne collected and collated all this data and forwarded it on to the WMO.
Temperature Data and IPCC’s Climate Change

In 2013 I attended an ANARE Midwinter Dinner – MWD. Australian Antarctic Division – AAD’s Acting Chief Scientist Dr Martin Riddle was our guest speaker at this function. I met with him over canapes before the dinner and spoke with him for about 20 minutes. I tried to get a sneak preview what his talk was going to be about. He said he was Australia’s lead scientist on the IPCC and, aside from giving us an update on the scientific program in the Antarctic, he was going to talk about climate and global warming. I asked him, were we not in an interglacial warm period in the 100,000 year Milankovitch Cycle and wasn’t all this current warming natural? His jaw dropped and was aghast. Our discussion ended there and he raced off not looking too happy. I couldn’t help but getting the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Milankovitch Cycles. It seemed like no one was supposed to know this.

It seems apparent that we all are just supposed to listen to what the IPCC are telling us and don’t ask questions. So what are the IPCC telling us?

The IPCC have produced 102 climate models to predict our future climate. The world’s meteorological organizations use weather models to forecast and predict weather and have been for many years. They have proved to be very accurate over 4 days and reasonably accurate over a week. The IPCC’s climate models are notoriously inaccurate. We’ve had these models now for some 30 years and we now have 30 years of data to compare them against. They are not even close to accurate.

Foreign Student Visas: Educating America’s Adversaries Guess who Obama’s State Department issues hundreds of thousands of student visas to? Michael Cutler

It has been said that if you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. This simple saying illustrates how important training/education is.

Incredibly, the United States’ immigration policies formulated by the Obama administration welcome hundreds of thousands of Chinese STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students into our nation’s premier universities while it is clear that China demonstrates hostility to the United States acting not as a partner, but rather as an adversary.

Chinese computer hackers attack computers in the United States as a matter of routine. The obvious question is how many of those Chinese computer hackers may have been trained and educated in the United States.

China’s recent theft of a U.S. Navy drone in the South China Sea underscores this hostility as do the arrest of numerous spies operating on behalf of China to steal America’s military and industrial secrets.

Not surprisingly, China has offered to return the drone while President-Elect Donald Trump has been quoted as saying that China can keep that drone.

China may have had two reasons for its illegal action. It is clearly attempting to demonstrate that it has unilateral control over the strategically important South China Sea although this claim is not based on law or fact. Additionally, China has an obvious interest in America’s military technology. By now China’s engineers have had ample opportunity to study the design of the drone and, perhaps, has managed to embed technology within the drone that would continue to provide intelligence about the use of that drone.

The U.S. Navy’s underwater drones seem to have drawn particular interest by China’s military. In fact, on April 22, 2016 Newsweek reported, “Chines Spy In Florida Sent Drone Parts To China For Military.”

On April 14, 2016 Newsweek published a report about a naturalized United States citizen, Edward Lin, who had joined the U.S. Navy only, allegedly, to be able to spy on the Navy. I cannot help but wonder if his application for citizenship had been more effectively scrutinized if his alleged disloyalty to the United States could have been uncovered sooner.

Hate Crime Hysteria A “victim” of a high-profile anti-Muslim incident recants, embarrassing New York politicians who bought her story whole-cloth. Seth Barron

Since Election Day, New York City officials have spoken regularly and emphatically about a rise in hate crimes, particularly those directed at Muslims. Gotham’s political leadership sees an obvious connection between Donald Trump’s victory and an uptick in hateful incidents. Mayor Bill de Blasio asserts that the rise “is documented . . . . It’s generated by the rhetoric that was used in the election. It’s not a surprise.” He also said, just a few days after the election, “some people now, unfortunately, take a signal from Donald Trump’s rhetoric that it’s open season against all the different kinds of people that Trump insulted and denigrated in his campaign.”

The mayor’s racial-hate narrative took an unexpected turn this week when one “victim” confessed that her story was entirely false. Yasmin Seweid, an 18-year-old Muslim woman, had told the police that she was accosted on the subway by three drunk white men who screamed insults at her, tried to pull off her headscarf, chanted Trump’s name, called her a terrorist, and told her to “go back to her country.” According to Seweid, there were many people on the train who saw what happened, but no one said or did anything. “It breaks my heart that so many individuals chose to be bystanders while watching me get harassed verbally and physically by these disgusting pigs,” she wrote on Facebook.

This last detail—that subway passengers in lower Manhattan ignored a young woman being violently assaulted—inspired visceral reactions among credulous New Yorkers who were primed to believe that Donald Trump’s victory had unleashed a flood of violent hate. City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito tweeted, “DESPICABLE! #StandUpNYC!! No more silence. No more hate.” A number of demonstrators from a Brooklyn synagogue stood in the middle of Grand Central Terminal and unfurled a banner reading “#NotInOurCity,” which turned out to be literally true, as the attack had in fact not happened in their city, or any city. Seweid has admitted that she made up the story as a way to keep her strict father from learning that she was out drinking with a Christian boyfriend. She has been arrested for filing a false police report.

In the 28-day period following November 8, the number of hate incidents reported by the NYPD rose from 20 in 2015 to 43 in 2016. Most of these incidents were anti-Semitic: hate incidents against Jews tripled year-over-year, from eight to 24. Anti-Muslim hate increased as well, from two incidents in 2015 to four in 2016 (including the bogus attack on Seweid—three if her case is excluded). There were no anti-Hispanic attacks in the 4-week period in either 2015 or 2016. Anti-black hate crimes dropped from two in 2015 to one this year. Anti-gay hate incidents went from four to five. Curiously, the sharpest increase in hate violence was against a group that is rarely mentioned in these discussions: anti-white hate crime rose from one incident in 2015 to five this year, according to the NYPD.

The Anti-Trump Curriculum Fanning the flames of intolerance, educators have done a disservice to their students and the country. Larry Sand

While hysteria and fearmongering over the governance of a Republican president have become standard—George W. Bush was frequently referred to as “Bushitler”—present-day anti-Trumpers have taken the acrimony to another level. Sadly, public schools are on the frontlines.

Just six days after the election, the teachers union in Los Angeles supported students who skipped school to protest the “politics of fear, racism and misogyny.” “As educators, as people spending every day with students and caring about each student’s future, we believe we have a sacred role in times like these,” the union said in a statement. Sacred? Too bad the union didn’t use its newly discovered religious faith to preach to the students that if they are indeed so upset with the president-elect, they should vent their dissatisfaction after the school day or on a weekend.

San Francisco social-studies teacher Fakhra Shah claims she knows “first-hand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of anti-Muslim slurs and stereotyping. The United Educators of San Francisco posted her “Lesson Plan on the 2016 Election” on its website. “DO NOT: Tell [students] that we have LOST and that we have to accept this,” it emphatically advises teachers. “We do not have to accept ANYTHING except that we must and will fight for justice against an unjust system and against unjust people.” The anger and denial here is just the tip of the iceberg:

(I know that [students] might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege. You would especially do so if you have not yet developed all of the tools necessary to fight this oppression. It is our job to help them develop these tools, ie the language etc., Let’s not penalize and punish our youth for how they express themselves at this stage.) (Hate mongering people see this as an invitation to use profanity, keep your hate to yourselves, our students are not hateful.)

The rest of this alarming and borderline illiterate “lesson plan”—with links to left-wing magazine Mother Jones and the George Soros-funded website Democracy Now!—continues in a similar vein (and, to be appreciated fully, should be read in its entirety). While teachers are free to accept or reject the lesson plan, the idea that any teacher would use any part of it is truly alarming.

There’s more. Down the peninsula from San Francisco is Google’s home city of Mountain View. At the local high school, “Holocaust scholar” Frank Navarro compared Trump with Hitler in an attempt to show his students “that the 2016 election is a reflection of the past.” Navarro was put on paid leave on November 10, but returned to the classroom a week later. In Texas, under the watchful eye of a teacher, two tenth-grade students staged a skit featuring “The Assassination of Donald Trump.” Parents were outraged by the performance, in which one of the boys made a gunfire sound effect with his cell phone as the other boy, portraying Trump, fell to the ground in mock death. The teacher and his students were “reprimanded.”

Recall that when a second grader nibbled a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun in Maryland a couple of years ago, he was suspended for two days. Maybe had he chewed a second Pop Tart into a replica of George W. Bush, and pointed his “gun” at it, he too could have gotten away with a reprimand.

Targeting Farage A hate group with an Orwellian name threatens to sue the Brexit hero. Bruce Bawer

“They go low, we go high.” “Love trumps hate.” The left, as we learned from the recent presidential campaign, is all about love. And hope. And, naturally, fighting hate.

Thus the name of the British organization Hope Not Hate. I’ve written about it before. It describes itself as an anti-fascist monitoring group, and the mainstream media, with few exceptions, routinely echo this self-description. In fact, however, HnH, founded in 2004, is far from what it pretends to be. Think of it as Britain’s answer to the Southern Poverty Law Center: a vicious smear machine masquerading as a virtuous anti-hate group.

It was Hope Not Hate that successfully campaigned to have Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller banned from the U.K. because of their criticism of Islam. It was Hope Not Hate that slandered me and several dozen other critics of Islam in an outrageously mendacious “Counter-Jihad Report” that actually juxtaposed photos of David Horowitz and Geert Wilders with one of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (complete with gun). It was Hope Not Hate that spent the run-up to the Brexit vote demonizing UKIP, the anti-EU party, which it routinely treated as racist, xenophobic, and neo-Nazi scum.

HnH’s modus operandi is always consistent: instead of engaging the arguments of its ideological opponents in a fair, factual way, it maligns us, misrepresents us, and does its damnedest to destroy our reputations. The ultimate goal, plainly, is to try to make us shut up and go away.

Now they’re at it again. Their latest target: none other than former UKIP head and Brexit hero Nigel Farage. After the December 19 attack in Berlin, Farage tweeted that such events “will be the Merkel legacy.” Merkel, he wrote, had “blood on her hands.” Farage was hardly alone in this opinion: perhaps the most common Facebook meme during the hours after the attack was a picture of Merkel with, yes, blood on her hands.

But at least one prominent Brit considered Farage’s remarks wildly inappropriate. On his own Twitter account, Brendan Cox warned Farage that “blaming politicians for the actions of extremists” would lead him down a “slippery slope.”

Who is Brendan Cox? He’s a professional left-wing activist who once served as an adviser to Gordon Brown. He’s held well-paid positions at groups with names like Crisis Action and was chief strategist at Save the Children, from which he resigned in 2015 after accusations of “inappropriate behavior.” But he’s best known as the widower of Labour MP Jo Cox, a vocal Remain advocate who was murdered last June by a right-wing fanatic. Following her death, her family encouraged contributions in her memory to three groups that had been “close to her heart.” One of them was Hope Not Hate.

Trump’s Israel Ambassador Will Drain the Two-State Solution Swamp It’s time to end the “Palestinian” hijacking of the US-Israel relationship. Daniel Greenfield

Ten years ago, a guy from Queens made a trip out during a snowstorm to pay a condolence call to a guy on Long Island on the passing of a Rabbi who was also his father. The guy from Queens is now President-elect and the man he was visiting became his close adviser and his choice for ambassador to Israel.

Last week, Trump gave his pro-Israel Jewish supporters an early Chanukah gift. He picked an ambassador who actually likes the Jewish State and hates Islamic terrorists.

It’s supposed to be the other way around.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Obama’s emissary to the country he hated almost as much as America, had denounced Israel on the day that a Jewish mother of six who died protecting her children from an Islamic terrorist encouraged to kill Jews by the Palestinian Authority, was being buried.

Shapiro has warned that our backing for Israel is contingent on Israel’s support for a PA-Hamas Islamic terror state inside its own borders and that Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for that terror state “raises questions about Israel’s real intentions.”

But Trump has decided to go with David Friedman, a friend of Israel, instead of an enemy. And the enemies of the Jewish State are united in their fury against Ambassador David Friedman.

“J Street is vehemently opposed to the nomination of David Friedman to be Ambassador to Israel.” the Soros funded anti-Israel group declared. Friedman has been a longtime critic of the hate group, comparing its support for Islamic terror against Israel to its key funder’s Nazi collaborating past.

The head of J Street is so upset that he appears to have found religion. “Lord help friends of Israel if someone like David Friedman is making US policy on Israel rather than John Kerry,” Jeremy ben Ami whined.

The Lord just might be helping Israel by sending Kerry back to Nantucket and David Friedman to Jerusalem. The anti-Israel media was already sputtering early this month when Friedman skipped Kerry’s rant against Israel to attend an event for the Israeli town of Beit El (Bethel or House of God) where Judah Maccabee had his command center in the battle against Antiochus IV that gave us Chanukah.

Our next ambassador chose the House of God and the Maccabees over John Forbes Kerry.

EDWARD CLINE: THE MADNESS OF QUEEN ANGELA

I take the title of this column from a 1994 British film, “The Madness of King George,” which dramatizes the enveloping insanity of George III, the monarch who lost America and was losing his mind. George kept committing actions that were “embarrassing” to the nation, but most of all, to the dignity of his station. Doctors were at a loss to diagnosis and possibly correct the king’s bizarre behavior and eccentricities. Given the primitive state of mental and physical science of the time, they were reduced to examining his stool for clues to a remedy. The only doctor to make a semblance of progress was one who insisted that all regal niceties be dropped and the King be put through a régimen of what only could be called, in certain military circles, “square bashing.” George would be put in a straight jacket every time he “misbehaved.”

But George III’s madness was a low-level one compared to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of madness. She cannot help but be aware of the insanity and the suicidal consequences of her policies, but she chooses them. George’s madness could not be corrected with rational persuasion or introspection. He was not capable of conscious irrationality. His mind careened in its own world of causo-connections.

As does Merkel’s.

Merkel’s madness, seeks to reduce her nation to being a deferential caliphate of Islam against the will of the non-Islamic population, which is expected to meld peacefully without complaint with the savages, rapists, thieves and welfare parasites. It is based on the madness of her brand of collectivism, Marxism.

Marxism itself is a system of madness that defies or denigrates human volition and goes against any measure of rationality. If you were born in a certain “class,” preferably a poor one, then you were destined to become a communist, or at least a socialist, and resent anyone better off economically than you. Dialectical Materialism brands you from the beginning and you have no choice about what you are and what you condition is. Your economic condition or circumstances indelibly “condition” how you think and behave.

Wikipedia has this description of Marxism:

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. It originates from the mid-to-late 19th century works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Marxist methodology originally used a method of economic and sociopolitical inquiry known as historical materialism to analyze and critique the development of capitalism and the role of class struggle in systemic economic change.

To Merkel’s mind, immigrants who rape, murder, or turn into bloody jihadis are just that way, through no fault of their own, it’s their cultural heritage, and they must not be judged according to Western measures of civil conduct, they were just born that way, and extraordinary efforts must be made to persuade them to be nice, and not commit crimes. They are blameless because that was how they were born.

The Grand Mufti reviewing Muslim troops in Bosnia

On the other hand, native Germans must make an effort to accommodate migrants and Muslims, and form a societal union with them until all conflict between Western and Muslim culture ceases. Unfortunately, the only “dialect” Muslims practice and understand is force. “Peace” in Islamic “dialectics” means your submission, or your death.

Obama set to back a boycott of Israel: A Wake-up Call to American Businesses and Taxpayers: Anne Bayefsky

This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

U.S. companies are in for a shock as President Obama takes aim once again at Israel in the final month of his presidency. In the coming days, he is expected to direct his team at the United Nations to vote for U.S. funding of “BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign aimed at financially ruining Israel and smearing the companies with which it does business.

The vote concerns the U.N. budget that is currently being negotiated and scheduled to be finalized this week. One of the line items provides funding for the implementation of a Human Rights Council resolution adopted in March. The resolution calls for the creation of a blacklist of companies around the world doing any business, directly or indirectly, connected to Israeli settlements. In effect, it launches a U.N.-sponsored BDS movement. Since the General Assembly holds the purse strings for the Human Rights Council’s operations, the time has come to allocate the money to pay for it.

With Obama’s U.N. diplomats sitting on their hands while the funding scheme is being hotly debated, American taxpayers can expect to find themselves funding BDS in the very near future, with American businesses caught in the crosshairs.

Israeli settlements consist of Jews living peaceful, productive lives on disputed territory whose ownership, by existing agreement, is to be determined through negotiations. This Jewish presence on Arab-claimed territory is offensive to a deeply anti-Semitic enemy that seeks to guarantee that land swapped in an eventual deal to create a Palestinian state will be Jew-free.

In the context of a Palestinian policy of ethnic cleansing, these Jewish farms, enterprises and schools are an “obstacle to peace,” to use the preferred verbiage of the United Nations and the Obama administration. The fact that Jews have repeatedly been moved in advance of a negotiated end to hostilities by their own government for the sake of peace, only to have those hopes dashed time and again, is simply dismissed.

Tunisian Migrant Investigated for Suspected Terror Ties Is Sought in Berlin Truck Attack Revelation that authorities sought and failed to deport asylum seeker stokes criticism of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy By Anton Troianovski and Ruth Bender see note pleaser

OH PULEEZ! ASYLUM SEEKER??? JIHAD SEEKER IS MORE LIKE IT…..RSK

BERLIN—Anis Amri, a Tunisian migrant whom authorities previously investigated for suspected terror ties and tried to deport, became Germany’s most wanted man as the new prime suspect in the capital’s deadly truck attack.

The revelation that the asylum seeker had been able to remain in Germany despite efforts to expel him stoked a furor over what many politicians called dangerous gaps in the country’s immigration policy and escalated the political crisis facing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

The federal police issued a rare international wanted notice for Mr. Amri—who arrived in Germany last year after time in an Italian prison—and offered a €100,000 ($104,000) reward, warning that he could be armed and dangerous.

Officials cautioned that they weren’t certain that Mr. Amri had, in fact, committed the crime and that it was possible someone else had planted the man’s residency permit in the truck. It was discovered in the cab of the semitrailer Tuesday, the day after it rammed into a Berlin Christmas market, leaving 12 dead and dozens injured. But, they said, the man was currently their No. 1 suspect.

Details emerging about Mr. Amri’s biography showed the case’s potential to boost critics who have argued that Ms. Merkel wasn’t taking Germans’ safety seriously enough in her open-door refugee policy. It also raised questions about the effectiveness of Germany’s security apparatus and, more broadly, Europe’s, particularly since the onset of the continent’s migration crisis.

On Wednesday, it appeared that critics’ predictions had come true: Despite German authorities’ earlier suspicions that the suspect had links to Islamist extremism, they said they had been unable to deport him because he lacked documentation proving he was from Tunisia. Officials said Germany finally received the new papers from Tunisian authorities on Wednesday—two days after the Christmas market attack.

“There is clearly a connection between the refugee crisis and the elevated terror danger in Germany,” conservative lawmaker Stephan Mayer said after a closed-door briefing in parliament on the investigation.