RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do you know who is selling you that souvenir T-shirt in the airport? You might want to.

In the late 1970s, it became known to international security agencies that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) owned a variety of duty-free shops in airports across Africa. They didn’t get too excited — selling newspapers and snack food didn’t seem particularly dangerous, and the breech of security posed by terrorists with all-airport access passes doesn’t seem to have aroused any great level of concern.

But that was before we stripped to our skivvies and dumped our lattes in order to board a plane. After years of hijackings and the horrors of 9/11, surely we’re smarter now.

Or not. Following the ISIS-orchestrated bombing at the Brussels Zaventem airport, part of a two-pronged attack that killed 31 people and injured more than 300, Belgian police disclosed that more than 50 known ISIS supporters are working in the airport as baggage handlers, cleaners, and catering staff. They have unprecedented access to passenger areas, back hallways, runways, and onto the airplanes themselves. The situation was so dire before the March 22nd bombing that Israeli inspectors warned the Belgian authorities of the danger. Similar warnings may also have come from the United States. No matter — nothing at all was done.

Some European countries, particularly the UK, have stepped up security around airports and other major facilities. But their focus is almost entirely on people passing through the system — passengers and their families — while the truth is the insider threat receives only perfunctory consideration in most Western venues.

Apart from airports, insider threats have been noted at nuclear power plants. In Belgium at least two atomic power stations have had jihadists working inside — at least two of whom went off to Syria to fight for ISIS. A plot, uncovered in Belgian authorities in February, appears to have targeted a senior scientist in hopes of acquiring nuclear material. Time magazine reported that 12 nuclear plant workers were stripped of their access badges — eight before the Zaventem bombing and four after.

The threat of an attack on a nuclear facility raises many horrific possibilities: a reactor meltdown, the theft of radioactive material for a dirty bomb, or holding a nuclear plant hostage threatening to destroy it unless specific conditions are met. But the most immediate and dire danger is a combination of an airplane hijacking and a 9/11 style hit on an atomic power plant.

Conservatives have good reason to view American universities as hostile territory. The 2006 Politics of the American Professoriate survey, conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, found that 17.6% of faculty in the social sciences consider themselves Marxists. Only 3.6% consider themselves conservatives. The same survey suggested that if the election of 2004 had been held exclusively in faculty lounges, John Kerry would have won in a historic landslide, 77.6% to 20.4%.

Progressive academics, otherwise so skilled at finding the prejudice behind every disparity, typically shrug this off. According to Mr. Gross, the explanation professors most often give for the scarcity of conservatives among their colleagues is that conservatives are close-minded. The second most popular explanation is that they are too money hungry to settle for a professor’s salary. In other words, if conservative academics are rare, they have their own defects to blame.

In “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. are not complaining—conservatives both, they are tenured political scientists at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. They aim to understand those conservatives who, despite being “widely stigmatized in academia,” have nonetheless made a home in higher education: What are they like, and how do they think they are doing?

Messrs. Shields and Dunn “interviewed and surveyed 153 conservative professors in six disciplines in the social sciences and humanities” at 84 universities. They located a diverse group of conservatives, including libertarians, by gathering names from conservative journals and organizations, and then they asked those professors to identify other conservatives. Messrs. Shields and Dunn do not claim that their sample is representative. But the results of their study, the first of its kind, are intriguing. CONTINUE AT SITE

This week’s fare at the Angelika Film Center in New York City includes “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a purported documentary that began its run on Friday. If only the theater’s schedulers had been making a droll point by choosing April Fool’s Day to launch this dangerously misleading movie falsely linking vaccines to autism. Instead, they all too eagerly snatched up the film after it had been ousted on March 26 from plans for the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

The decision to remove “Vaxxed” from the festival was the right one, and credit goes to organizers, in particular co-founder Robert De Niro, who has a son with autism, for having the courage to reconsider their plans. If “Vaxxed” had been submitted as science fiction, it would merit attention for its story line, character development and dialogue. But as a documentary it misrepresents what science knows about autism, undermines public confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and attacks the integrity of legitimate scientists and public-health officials.

As Mr. De Niro explained in announcing that “Vaxxed” would be dropped from the festival: “My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

I am among those Mr. De Niro consulted. In a 45-minute phone conversation with him, I recommended that the festival withdraw the film from the “documentary” category and not screen it.

The filmmakers claim they have not stated that autism is caused by the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, known as MMR. However, that is the inescapable message of “Vaxxed.” And it is certainly the stance of Andrew Wakefield, the discredited British researcher who is the movie’s director and co-writer. CONTINUE AT SITE

Every warmish day inspires media references to broken temperature records, the implicit message being that we have just endured further evidence of a planet in its sweaty death throes. Need it be said that those alarms should be taken with the usual grain of salt?
In late January, I was startled to hear the Nine News weather reporter breathlessly exclaim that a maximum of 33C in Sydney on the 21st of that month happened to be 7C above the city’s average January maximum. That’s it – 7C, for Heaven’s sake! My initial impression was that couching the report in those terms had been intended to add a global warming shock-and-awe angle to the report. After all, 7C is well above the 2C we are told is the magical figure beyond which we will all fry. Not that contrasting one day’s mercury with long-term records is an apples-to-apples comparison, but how many gullible warming believers would be capable of, or even bother, making this distinction?

My second reaction was to think that 33C doesn’t seem to me to be remarkably hot for January; neither did it strike me that 26C would be a likely average January maximum, so I had a look at Weatherzone. To my surprise it confirmed that the mean January maximum for Sydney is, indeed, 25.9C. So there you are. This is the long term mean maximum for January. The high mean maximum for January is actually 29.5C and that was recorded in 1896.

A closer examination of the data reveals that the figure of 7C on any particular day is not all that remarkable – so unremarkable, in fact, that it confirms my impression it was cited for purely propaganda reasons.

Sydney’s January high maximum is 45.8C and its low minimum is 10.6. So, historically, daily January temperatures in Sydney range over 35.2C. The maximum temperature on January 21 of 33C was actually 12.8C lower than the highest recorded January maximum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQjTLGgQV2w – A Special Kind Of Hate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZKAewadF9U – Feminist Whores for Islam

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Ann Marie Waters, the Director of Sharia Watch UK and deputy leader ofPegida UK. http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/03/ann-marie-waters-on-islam-kills-women-on-the-glazov-gang/

Ann Marie discussed “Islam Kills Women” — the name of the protest that she will be holding on August 20, 2016 outside the Parliament in Westminster to bring attention to Islam’s oppression of women in the UK and abroad. [For more info on the protest, write Ann Marie via contact@shariawatch.org.uk.]

Ann Marie focused on Islam’s hazardous impact on free speech and women’s rights in Britain and around the world — and the way the government and culture are demonizing truth-tellers on this issue. She also brings attention to the myriad catastrophic consequences that opening borders to vast numbers of men from Sharia environments is having on the UK and the West.

Don’t miss it!