RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2018/09/29/the_organic_food_industry_gets_fat_on_lies_110755.html

In “The Wealth of Nations,” the 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith observed about the chicanery of some businessmen, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Nowhere is that truer than in today’s organic agriculture and food industries.

In an August Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “The Organic Industry Is Lying to You,” I described the ways those industries misrepresent the benefits of their products and broadcast spurious concerns about modern genetic engineering of crop plants – in other words, mendaciously trashing the competition.

The Journal published two responses to my op-ed from representatives of the organic industry that perfectly illustrate my thesis: Like tobacco industry executives before them, they have to lie in order to defend a flawed product.

Cameron Harsh, of the rabidly anti-technology NGO, Center for Food Safety, denied that organic farmers use harmful chemicals. In fact, many organic-approved pesticides pose significant environmental and human health risks. They include nicotine sulfate, which his highly toxic to warm-blooded animals; another is copper sulfate, a widely-used broad-spectrum organic pesticide that persists in the soil and is the most common residue found in organic food. The European Union determined that copper sulfate may cause cancer and intended to ban it, but backed off because organic farmers don’t have good alternatives.

More than two dozen synthetic chemical pesticides are permitted in organic agriculture, and organic farmers are demanding more. The reason is revealing. Organic practices are so primitive and inferior that constantly-challenged organic farmers periodically go whining to USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (whose members are from the organic industry), which rubber-stamps their requests for new chemicals to be approved. For example, as described in Food Safety News earlier this year:

https://www.city-journal.org/truth-about-polygraph-tests-16180.html

News organizations would render a valuable service if, whenever they report that someone has taken or proposes to take a polygraph, they reminded readers (or explained to them) that polygraphs are voodoo. Junk science. They are no more reliable than a pack of Tarot cards. Polygraph evidence is inadmissible in court. There is a good reason for that. To check Brett Kavanaugh’s qualifications for the Supreme Court, Congress would do well to ask him whether he believes Frye v. United States and United States v. Scheffer were correctly decided. This would be far more illuminating (and meaningful) to anyone trying to discern his qualifications for the Court than asking him whether he assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

Journalists who report that Mike Pence has offered to take a polygraph (to prove that he was not the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed), or that Ford has taken one, without explaining that polygraphs cannot discern truth from falsehood are wasting an opportunity to educate their readers. If you promulgate the idea that there’s a machine that can tell when someone is lying, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself living in a culture so hostile to science that kids go unvaccinated and measles break out in the First World.

A polygraph measures your heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response. There is no evidence that any pattern of physiological responses is unique to deception. Polygraphs are useful to investigators trying to elicit a confession, however: if you convince suggestible people that these measurements are associated with lying, they are more likely spontaneously to confess when you tell them, “The machine says you’re lying.”

It works as follows:

I say, “We’ve got your endotrygliceride levels from the doorknob you’re touching. We’ll match those up against the steering wheel and that’ll tell us the whole story right there. Son, why on earth wouldn’t you want us to match up those endotrygliceride levels if you’re not involved in this? If you’re afraid of what those endotrygliceride levels will tell me, you should sit right back down. If the truth comes out later and you’ve been wasting my time, I won’t be able to help you.”

I was right. It was the moment. The endotrygliceride levels never lie. Then I tell the suspect he is guilty. Full stop. He is guilty and I know he is guilty. I tell him all the evidence we have against him, piling it up later after layer until he feels entombed by his misdeeds, until the suspect is well-nigh positive he cannot escape.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/14/hurricane-florence-climate-change-global-warming-weather-greenhouse-flood-column/1289272002/
It’s likely due to natural weather patterns, not climate change as some have already said.

Even before Hurricane Florence made landfall somewhere near the border of North and South Carolina, predicted damage from potentially catastrophic flooding from the storm was already being blamed on global warming.

Writing for NBC News, Kristina Dahl contended, “With each new storm, we are forced to question whether this is our new, climate change-fueled reality, and to ask ourselves what we can do to minimize the toll from supercharged storms.”

The theory is that tropical cyclones have slowed down in their speed by about 10 percent over the past 70 years due to a retreat of the jet stream farther north, depriving storms of steering currents and making them stall and keep raining in one location. This is what happened with Hurricane Harvey in Houston last year.

But like most claims regarding global warming, the real effect is small, probably temporary, and most likely due to natural weather patterns. Any changes in hurricanes over 70 years, even if real, can easily be part of natural cycles — or incomplete data. Coastal lake sediments along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline from 1,000 to 2,000 years ago suggest more frequent and intense hurricanes than occur today. Why? No one knows.
Unusual things happen in nature sometimes

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 experienced a Category 3 or 4 storm, with up to a 20-foot storm surge. While such a storm does not happen in New England anymore, it happened again there in 1675, with elderly eyewitnesses comparing it to the 1635 storm.

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.

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

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/fall_madness__hurricanes_and_global_warming.html

Fall is officially upon us with the passing of Labor Day. After this seasonal landmark, we are not supposed to wear white. I’m surprised CNN’s Don Lemon hasn’t found something racist in this tradition.

Football season has started, kneeling players and all. It’s been a busy week for the media as we are now less than two months away from the critical Congressional midterm elections. The media is not taking a knee; instead, they are on full offense with the Bob Woodward book and the anonymous NY Times op-ed, both full-fledged assaults on President Trump.

Fall is also hurricane season which means not only football jerseys coming out of the closet, but the hackneyed global warming doomsday predictions. The left-wing media, however, may not give hurricane season its due since there are more important stories to cover, like Colin Kaepernick, the Bret Kavanaugh confirmation circus, and Pocahontas wanting to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump.

Tropical Storm Florence is in the Caribbean and heading toward Florida, with early storms Helene and Isaac hanging out off the coast of Africa, deciding whether to huff and puff, or really blow the house down.

Florence, not yet a hurricane, but expected to become one, looks like it will impact the Carolinas. Or maybe up the US coast. Or possibly Florida. Or maybe harmlessly out to sea. The spaghetti models show all the possibilities. Here are the complied guesses from Weathernerds.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmentalists-need-to-get-real-1536010580

“Many environmentalists fail to grasp that the real problem isn’t skepticism that the climate is changing, or even that human activity is a leading cause of the change. Millions worry about climate change and believe human activity is in large part responsible. But they do not believe that the climate movement has the answers for the problems it describes. Green policy blunders, like support for ethanol in the U.S. and knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power, erode confidence that environmental activists—who too often have an anticapitalist, Malthusian and technophobic view of the world—can be trusted, to as they often say, to “save the planet.”

Last week French environmental minister Nicolas Hulot, once a prominent supporter of President Emmanuel Macron, threw in the towel. “I don’t want to lie anymore. I don’t want to create the illusion that my presence in the government means that we are on top of [environmental] issues,” he said during a live broadcast announcing his resignation.

Mr. Hulot is not alone among environmentalists in denouncing the hypocrisy and inadequacy of government action on climate change. The Paris accords are “a fraud, really, a fake,” said climate activist James Hansen in 2015. “There is no action, just promises.”

Three years later, Mr. Hansen’s words look prescient. Even ostensibly committed countries like Germany and France are on course to miss the voluntary 2020 targets they announced to such fanfare in 2015. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that only Morocco and Gambia are on a “Paris agreement compatible” path.

The climate-change movement is stuck, even after a scorching summer elevated the issue across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It is powerful enough to command lip service from politicians, but too weak to impose the policies it says are needed to prevent catastrophic change.