Displaying posts categorized under

MEDIA

MEDIA Comments turned off

Story Laundering: Fusion GPS, Fake News, Russians and Reporters The media’s real business is ‘story laundering’. November 3, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

By on November 3rd, 2017

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Ben Rhodes gloated. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes, the White House’s “Obama whisperer”, was explaining how he had pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a journalist. The media responded to the story by attacking the journalist who reported it, not Rhodes for viewing them as easily manipulated useful idiots.

The media knew that it knew nothing. And it didn’t care. It just didn’t want outsiders to know it.

What ties together the debate about Russian collusion, fake news and Fusion GPS is the implosion of the media. What were the professional reporters doing while Rhodes was manipulating the 27-year-olds? They were working at places like Fusion GPS and ‘story laundering’ narratives to the kiddies.

The media markets its investigative journalism chops even as investigative journalism no longer fits into its business model. Companies like Fusion GPS and political manipulators like Ben Rhodes step into the vacuum by covertly providing them with the core product. Much of the media is really in the business of ‘story laundering’ by rewriting talking points, smears and hit pieces from organizations like Fusion GPS.

The readers get talking points served to them without ever knowing who actually produced them. The forensic examination of the Trump dossier answered some of these questions. Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS hired a British former intelligence officer. And he got his material from, among other sources, a Russian intelligence officer. And they passed the material to the media and the FBI.

It took a great deal of effort, including a congressional subpoena, a national scandal and the threat of impeachment, to peel back the workings of the media and expose how the dossier sausage got made. Most packaged media stories never receive this level of scrutiny. And the media is quick to indignantly defend its lack of transparency and reliance on anonymous sources in its Trump hit pieces.

But what the current controversy really reveals is the decline and fall of the media.

The media has outsourced story generation to the shadowy underworld that produced the Trump dossier. Much as NPR outsourced its coverage of the Iran Deal to Ploughshares and the Iran Lobby in exchange for $100K. This isn’t bias in the conventional sense. It’s native advertising all the way. The media ‘rents’ space to outside interests. It rewrites their stories in the house style and runs them.

Sometimes, like NPR, there’s a financial arrangement. Other times the media gets stories that it lacks the resources and the time to generate on its own. Or access. And sometimes it’s just a political alliance.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Ferguson: A Dramatist Corrects Journalists Playwright Phelim McAleer has done a public service in depicting how all the destruction that the town rained down on itself sprang from one man’s errant decision. By Kyle Smith —

By on November 3rd, 2017

Missouri declared itself under a state of emergency on two occasions, months apart, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on August 9, 2014, and there were many other outbursts of violence and property destruction. All of this unrest was based on a lie started by Brown’s unreliable friend Dorian Johnson and amplified by an eager, credulous media: That Brown was unresisting, had his hands in the air and was begging not to be shot when he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson.

Sometimes it falls to a dramatist to correct journalists, and the journalist-turned-filmmaker-turned playwright Phelim McAleer has done a public service in sifting out the truth in Ferguson, a breathless 90-minute courtroom drama in which all dialogue is taken verbatim from the 25-day grand-jury proceedings that resulted in a decision not to charge Wilson. (The current production closes November 4 at the 30th Street Theatre in Manhattan but the play, which is being funded via crowdsourcing, will be restaged later in a different venue if interest is sufficient.)

Thirteen actors, some performing multiple roles, play the witnesses and the prosecutors who question them in a case everyone is aware the world is watching. Brown, routinely described in the media as an “unarmed teen,” as if the fists of an enraged 289-pound man do not constitute a threat, was under the influence of a large dose of marijuana when he and his friend Johnson were stopped by Wilson because they were walking down the double yellow line in the middle of the street. In Brown’s right hand, the officer noticed, was a box of cigarillos, which was of interest because he had just heard over the radio that a man matching Brown’s description had just robbed a small convenience store of a box of cigarillos and angrily shoved a clerk who tried to stop him.

McAleer and director Jerry Dixon begin the play, which takes place on a single set representing the grand-jury room, in an unassuming manner. Secondary witnesses describe unimportant encounters with Brown in the hours before he lost his life at noon. One laborer remarks that Brown was mentally “slow.” A cop who trained Wilson describes him as eager to work with the mostly black community and says he enjoyed buying meals for young people. The testimony of one sketchy witness, a white woman, falls apart when she says she walked through a passage that was physically blocked, and denies having read newspaper accounts of the shooting. In fact, she has posted Facebook comments beneath one such story, comments expressing such sentiments as “They need to kill the f*****g n*****s.” Another witness, a black man, has told the FBI he saw Wilson standing over the prone body of Brown pumping many bullets into his back. A prosecutor drily informs him that as he has a) given a statement inconsistent with the autopsy report and b) changed his story, he stands no chance of being invited to testify at any trial in the matter.

Continue reading →
MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black By Marilyn Penn

By on October 31st, 2017

The Sunday Times offered a full page editorial on the subject of sexual harassment in America (Post-Weinstein, What’s Different 10/29/17) One of its paragraphs deals with How to Change the Culture and what various mega-chains like Walmart and McDonald have done to require their tomato growers to prevent harassment and assault of farmworkers. This seems a particularly odd concern considering the tenor of our mass culture that couldn’t be better illustrated than the Sunday Styles section of the Times itself.

The front page has two lead articles with accompanying photographs: “On the Street Where She Still Works” – a look at how hookers influence fashion and the arts, and “Future Sex is Here” – a look a virtual pornography. The photo accompanying the first piece is that of Maggie Gyllenhaal, star of the series “The Deuce”, wearing a ratty fur jacket over a skimpy slip. I watched five minutes of The Deuce during which Maggie was nude with flashes of her breasts and pubic hair visible to the prime time audience – undoubtedly an essential artistic element in the plot. The article about pornography printed in large font type, details the solo masturbation scene of the young actress who has been in the porn industry since her college days and takes it almost as seriously as the newspaper does, sparing us nothing including mention of her erotic electrostimulation (electrosex) I wonder whether the women in the Times workplace while the paper was being readied for printing were disturbed by this content and might be justified in considering this a form of harassment. What about the women reading it – does mainstreaming pornography not play a big part in the rapid rise of sexual assaults on young women on campus? Does the fact that the blonde porn queen started her profession from her dorm room further normalize and sanction an unsavory industry? Does its mass distribution not affect what men have come to expect from women? How many articles has the Times itself published concerning the changing mores of sexual intimacy between couples as increasing numbers of men prefer the gymnastic deviancy on their computer screens to the more humdrum activity in their beds.

One of the other paragraphs in the self-righteous editorial concerns power and money and how these combine to allow predatory men to silence women who fear for their jobs. What about publishers of a newspaper rapidly losing its subscription base, turning to the good old-fashioned lure of sensational sex to attract those readers who like to look at pictures and respond to words like “coy, flirty and dirty, sexy as hell, bondage fetishes, live X-rated performances.” Is this sort of titillation what we expect in the newspaper that pretends to object to the misdeeds of Harvey Weinstein?

The Times editorial closes with this caveat: “In the end, though, the most lasting change will have to come from men, who are doing virtually all the sexual harassing. Boys must be raised to understand why that behavior is wrong, teenagers need to be reminded of it and grown men need to pay for it until they get the message.” Will the feminists don their pussy hats and protest the elevation of prostitution and pornography to fashionable subjects of STYLE? Will women boycott a newspaper whose male management opts for these editorial decisions? Anita Hill was offended by a tasteless joke about a pubic hair on a coke bottle; what might she have said if, like the female reporter in the Times, her assignment was to write an upbeat piece headlining a woman who went into pornography, not our of financial desperation, but as her profession of choice? In all probability, Mr. Sulzberger would not have been confirmed.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Facebook, Social Media, Aiding Jihad; Censoring Those Who Counter Jihad by Benjamin Weingarten

By on October 26th, 2017

That major technology companies are openly stifling the free speech of people trying to counter jihad is bad enough; what is beyond unconscionable is that they simultaneously enable Islamic supremacists to spread the very content that the counter-jihadists have been exposing.

According to the legal complaint, the names and symbols of Palestinian Arab terrorist groups and individuals were known to authorities, and “Facebook has the data and capability to cease providing services to [such] terrorists, but… has chosen not to do so.”

A separate lawsuit claims that Twitter not only benefits indirectly by seeing its user base swell through the increase of ISIS-linked accounts, but directly profits by placing targeted advertisements on them.

When jihadist content is permitted to spread unchecked across the globe via cyberspace, it is a matter of national and international security. Tragically for Western civilization, its tech and media icons have been colluding — even if unwittingly — with those working actively to destroy it.

For the past few years, large social media and other online companies have been seeking to restrict or even criminalize content that could be construed as critical of Islam or Muslims, including when the material simply exposes the words and actions of radical Islamists.

The recent attempt by the digital payment platform, PayPal, to forbid two conservative organizations — Jihad Watch and the American Freedom Defense Initiative — from continuing to use the service to receive donations, is a perfect case in point. Although PayPal reversed the ban, its initial move was part of an ongoing war against the free speech of counter-jihadists — those working to expose the ideology, goals, tactics and strategies of Islamic supremacists, and who are trying to defeat or at least to deter the Islamic supremacist global agenda.

Examples of this kind of censorship abound. In October 2016, for instance, conservative radio host and author Dennis Prager’s “PragerU” — which produces five-minute clips presented by leading experts in the fields of economics, politics, national security and culture — announced that more than a dozen of its videos were facing restricted access on YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. In theory, this meant that users who employed the filter for sexually explicit or violent content would be blocked from it.

Among these restricted videos however, were six relating to Islam: “What ISIS Wants,” presented by Tom Joscelyn, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; “Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?” presented by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute and Harvard’s Belfer Center; “Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do,” presented by Khurram Dara, a Muslim American activist, author and attorney; “Pakistan: Can Sharia and Freedom Coexist?” and “Why Do People Become Islamic Extremists?” presented by Haroon Ullah, a foreign policy professor at Georgetown University; and “Radical Islam: The Most Dangerous Ideology,” presented by Raymond Ibrahim, author of The Al Qaeda Reader.

PragerU is not alone in having its content — presented by reputable thinkers — treated by social media companies as comparable to pornography, or similarly inappropriate or offensive material. For instance:

In January 2015, a mere two weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned a #JeSuisCharlie statement in defense of free speech — in the wake of the Islamist terrorist attack on the Paris-based satirical journal Charlie Hebdo — Facebook censored images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey.
In January 2016, the Facebook page “Justin Trudeau Not,” which contained content critical of the Canadian prime minister’s views on Islamic supremacism, was deleted by Facebook as a “violation of community standards.” The offense? The page’s authors “contrasted Trudeau’s immediate condemnation of a pepper spray attack against Muslims in Vancouver with his complete refusal to address a firearm attack by Muslims in Calgary.”
In May 2016, the administrator of a pro-Trump Facebook group was banned from Facebook for posting: “Donald Trump is not anti-Muslim. He is anti ISIS. What Trump is trying to say is that Homeland Security cannot differentiate which Muslim is [a] radical wanting to cause harm and which is a harmless refugee. Who is willing to sacrifice their family’s safety for the sake of political correctness? Are you?”
In June 2016, YouTube removed a video — “Killing for a Cause: Sharia Law & Civilization Jihad” — elucidating the aim of Islamic supremacists to subvert the West from within.
Also in June 2016, Facebook suspended the account of Swedish writer Ingrid Carlqvist for posting a video, produced by Gatestone Institute, on “Sweden’s Migrant Rape Epidemic.” After Gatestone readers responded critically to the censorship, the Swedish media started reporting on the case, and Facebook reinstated the video, without any explanation or apology.
In May 2017, Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, a party “committed to the maintenance of British national sovereignty, independence and freedom,” was banned from Facebook for 30 days for “repeatedly posting things that aren’t allowed on Facebook.” The post that reportedly triggered t

Continue reading →
MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU Lectures Journalists about PC Reporting by Bruce Bawer

By on October 25th, 2017

Nor, we are told, should we associate “terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’… with particular acts,” because to do that is to “stigmatize.” What exactly does this mean? That when a man shouts “Allahu Akbar” after having gunned down, run over with a truck, or blown to bits dozens of innocent pedestrians or concertgoers, we are supposed to ignore that little detail?

But that is what this document is all about: advising reporters just how to misrepresent reality in EU-approved fashion.

It is interesting to note that while many people fulminate over President Trump’s complaints about “fake news,” they are silent when an instrument of the EU superstate presumes to tell the media exactly what kind of language should and should and should not be used when reporting on the most important issue of the day.

“Respect Words: Ethical Journalism Against Hate Speech” is a collaborative project that has been undertaken by media organizations in eight European countries – Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain. Supported by the Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Union, it seeks, according to its website, to help journalists, in this era of growing “Islamophobia,” to “rethink” the way they address “issues related to migratory processes, ethnic and religious minorities.” It sounds benign enough: “rethink.” But do not kid yourself: when these EU-funded activists call for “rethinking,” what they are really doing is endorsing self-censorship.

In September, “Respect Words” issued a 39-page document entitled Reporting on Migration & Minorities: Approach and Guidelines. Media outlets, it instructs, “should not give time or space to extremist views simply for the sake of ‘showing the other side.'” But which views count as “extremist”? The report does not say – not explicitly, anyway. “Sensationalist or overly simplistic reporting on migration,” we read, “can enflame existing societal prejudices” and thus “endanger migrants’ safety.” Again, what counts as “sensationalist” or “overly simplistic”? That is not spelled out, either. Nor, we are told, should we associate “terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’… with particular acts,” because to do that is to “stigmatize.” What exactly does this mean? That when a man shouts “Allahu Akbar” after having gunned down, run over with a truck, or blown to bits dozens of innocent pedestrians or concertgoers, we are supposed to ignore that little detail?

Or perhaps we should entirely avoid covering such actions? After all, the document exhorts us not to write too much about “sensationalist incidents involving migrants,” as “[v]iolent individuals are found within every large group of people.” If, however, we do feel compelled to cover such incidents, we must never cease to recall that the “root causes” of these incidents “often have nothing to do with a person’s ethnicity or religious affiliation.” What, then, are those root causes? The report advises us that they include “colonialism, racism, [and] general social inequality.” Do not forget, as well, that there is “no structural connection between migration and terrorism.”

Continue reading →
MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Century of Murder and Illusion The New York Times’ continuing romance with an evil ideology cries out for an answer. Bruce Thornton

By on October 24th, 2017

To mark the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution The New York Times has been running a series called “Red Century.” In the spirit of its Pulitzer-Prize winning Moscow correspondent and uber fellow-traveler in the thirties, Walter Duranty, the articles in the main are an exercise in rehabilitation rather than historical evaluation. Given communism’s historically unprecedented and copiously documented record of slaughter, torture, mass imprisonment, brutal occupation, and utter failure to achieve its workers’ paradise of justice and equality, the question why the Times would attempt to mitigate the evil of a totalitarian ideology that led to 100 million dead cries out for an answer.

The first place to look for an explanation is the rise of scientism in the increasingly secularized 19th century. The success of legitimate science in understanding the material world, and turning that knowledge into practical use by creating life-improving technologies, fostered the illusion that human nature and behavior could be similarly understood and improved by the same methods. As Isaiah Berlin described this Enlightenment optimism,

The success of physics seemed to give reason for optimism: once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation . . . The rational reorganization of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.

Marxist theory was the child of this belief, which also created psychology, economics, sociology, and all the other “human sciences.” As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.” And once those “laws” were understood, “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin put it, could create a better world of equality and social justice––if they had the political power to reorganize society and eliminate those who stood in the way.

Communism, then, was taken not as a political philosophy, but as a scientific discovery that only the irrational, the evil, or those blinded by bourgeois “false consciousness” would reject. Like science, communism was about progress, optimism for the future, and the liberation of humans from social and political bondage by improving the economic and social conditions of human life. It had “an inherent optimism for the future,” as one Times article gushed. This notion that humans can be shaped and improved by rational technique still remains a dominant sensibility in the West, which explains the continuing hold of leftist ideology. From Obama’s 2012 campaign slogan “Forward,” a traditional leftist motto, to the fads of “behavioral science” like “implicit bias,” our world is still enthralled to this superstition that “human sciences” can improve life and transcend the historical disorder and evil our ancestors attributed to a flawed and tragic human nature.

Of course, this optimism is predicated on a category error. Humans, each a unique individual endowed with a mind and free will, lie beyond the “complexity horizon,” and so cannot be reduced to mere matter determined by the laws of physics or economic development, as Marx believed. Communism fails because it must diminish this human complexity so that people can be shoe-horned into the theory. It is reductive and simplistic, and necessarily dehumanizing. And dehumanization has ever been the precursor to mass murder and totalitarian tyranny. In the case of communism, its followers’ fanatical certainty that their beliefs were the fruit of objective “science” and the vehicle of universal human improvement, made it easier to ignore their own destructive passions and flaws, particularly their lust for power and domination; and to remove “by any means necessary” the stiff-necked opponents of humanity’s glorious future––the “eggs” that must be broken to make the communist “omelet,” as Walter Duranty reported in the Times in 1933.

But as the history of communism has shown, its road to utopia runs over mountains of corpses.

The second cultural transformation that has kept a failed and murderous ideology alive is the radical secularism of the last two centuries. The decline in faith created a vacuum of disbelief intolerable to human beings. Substitutes had to be found to explain existence and human nature, provide a meaningful narrative that identifies the good and the evil, and describe the destiny awaiting those who accepted the new revelation. Political religions, whether fascism, “blood and soil” nationalism, or communism, filled the spiritual emptiness of a secularizing age. But communism was more attractive and powerful than fascism, for it was the bedfellow of scientism, the other pseudo-religion of modernity that promised salvation, only in this world rather than the mythic “heaven” of oppressive and irrational religious belief.

Continue reading →
MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe: Journalists Against Free Speech by Judith Bergman

By on October 24th, 2017

Gone is all pretense that journalism is about reporting the facts. These are the aims of a political actor.

Being bought and paid for by the EU apparently counts as “press freedom” these days.

According to the guidelines, journalists should, among other things, “Provide an appropriate range of opinions, including those belonging to migrants and members of minorities, but… not… extremist perspectives just to ‘show the other side’…. Don’t allow extremists’ claims about acting ‘in the name of Islam’ to stand unchallenged…. where it is necessary and newsworthy to report hateful comments against Muslims, mediate the information.”

The European Federation of Journalists (EJF), “the largest organization of journalists in Europe, represents over 320,000 journalists in 71 journalists’ organizations across 43 countries,” according to its website. The EJF, a powerful player, also leads a Europe-wide campaign called “Media against Hate.”

The “Media against Hate” campaign aims to:

“counter hate speech[1] and discrimination in the media, both on and offline… media and journalists play a crucial role in informing…policy … regarding migration and refugees. As hate speech and stereotypes targeting migrants proliferate across Europe… #MediaAgainstHate campaign aims to: improve media coverage related to migration, refugees, religion and marginalised groups… counter hate speech, intolerance, racism and discrimination… improve implementation of legal frameworks regulating hate speech and freedom of speech…”

Gone is all pretense that journalism is about reporting the facts. These are the aims of a political actor.

A very large political actor is, in fact, involved in the “Media against Hate” campaign. The campaign is one of several media programs supported by the EU under its Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (REC). In the REC program for 2017, the EU Commission, the EU’s executive body, writes:

“DG Justice and Consumers [the EU Commission’s justice department] will address the worrying increase of hate crime and hate speech by allocating funding to actions aiming at preventing and combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance… including dedicated work in the area of countering online hate speech (implementation of the Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online)… DG Justice also funds civil society organisations combatting racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance”.

This political player, the EU, the biggest in Europe, works openly at influencing the “free press” with its own political agendas. One of these agendas is the issue of migration into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. In his September State of the Union address, the president of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, made it clear that whatever Europeans may think — polls repeatedly show that the majority of Europeans do not want any more migrants — the EU has no intention of putting a stop to migration. “Europe,” Juncker said, “contrary to what some say, is not a fortress and must never become one. Europe is and must remain the continent of solidarity where those fleeing persecution can find refuge”.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Former NPR president leaves the blue bubble and is shocked by what he learns about non-elite Americans By Thomas Lifson

By on October 23rd, 2017

I must give Ken Stern, the former CEO of National Public Radio, great credit for having the courage to leave the comforting company of fellow urban elite liberals, and engaging in an odyssey through red America. Writing in the New York Post (where the people who really need to read him won’t be found – they are reading the Times), he lays out his research:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.

To the surprise of very few AT readers, he discovered that the caricatures common on newsrooms throughout the media is utterly false. His long essay drips with sincerity.

But I don’t know how all the angry leftists he left behind will be able to listen to him, for he is far too threatening to their self-esteem, based as it is on sneering down on others.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

John Kelly shames the shameless media by Eddie Scarry

By on October 22nd, 2017

As badly as White House chief of staff John Kelly roasted Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., his statements about her unseemly politicization of the president’s call to a Gold Star widow were at the same time a rebuke to how the media reflexively aided Wilson’s narrative.

Kelly said at the press briefing Thursday that he was “stunned” and “brokenhearted” when he saw Wilson in TV interviews and quoted in news reports divulging details about a personal call from Trump to Myeisha Johnson, whose husband died in an enemy ambush earlier this month in Niger.

In front of a room of uncharacteristically hushed reporters, Kelly said he was dismayed to see Wilson politicize one of the few sacred things left: The mourning of a fallen soldier. In this case, Sgt. La David T. Johnson.

Wilson told reporters earlier in the week that she was there for the on-speaker call between President Trump and Myeisha Johnson. She said Trump was “insensitive” because, according to Wilson, Trump told Johnson, “Well, I guess he knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurts.”

Wilson told the story to a Miami NBC affiliate and it was passed around by journalists on social media.

Jill Filipovic, a liberal contributor to the New York Times, said on Twitter, “What kind of awful soulless human says this? How does anyone still support this man?”

CNN national security analyst Michael Weiss said the quote relayed by Wilson would be comparable to Trump saying, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay outta the kitchen.”

Wilson went on CNN Tuesday night to recount the story and then did it again Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

There is no recording of the conversation to corroborate Wilson’s quote or even her ungenerous interpretation of the phone call. Assuming the quote is accurate, Kelly said he had told Trump to say something along those same lines, because it was what most comforted Kelly after his own son died serving in Afghanistan.

But MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who spends three hours each weekday giving his best daring look into a TV camera, helped Wilson’s tale move along.

When Wilson said at the end of the interview that she’s “not trying to politicize” the call, Scarborough sympathetically replied, “No, we completely understand. We completely understand.”

Trump said Thursday night on Twitter that Wilson’s version of the call was a “total lie,” which CNN’s Chris Cillizza, the Golden Corral of political commentary, said was an example of the president taking “the low road.”

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times Embraces Fake Science, Fake Engineering, and Fake Economics By Norman Rogers

By on October 18th, 2017

The Oct. 16, 2017 New York Times devotes most of a full page to an editorial promoting “5 Climate Truths Mr. Trump Doesn’t Get.” They even have graphs to supposedly illustrate their five truths. As someone who has studied climate change and renewable energy I immediately understood that their editorial was very simplistic and does not engage with economic or engineering realities.

The Times’ view is that it is important to reduce CO2 emissions and that wind and solar energy are the way to do that. They also imagine that batteries storing power are the solution for the erratic nature of wind and solar generation. They particularly dislike coal because it emits more CO2 when burned compared to natural gas.

I have to assume the editors of the New York Times are not stupid. Probably they have a very weak grasp of science and engineering and probably ideology blinds them, preventing objective study of the issues.

Global warming is now called climate change because the globe has not warmed for two decades. The “science” behind predictions of global warming due to emissions of CO2 has clearly collapsed. The promoters of the catastrophe are most charitably described as bad scientists and less charitably as snake oil salesmen. The predictions are based on computer models that don’t agree with each other and that have failed miserably in predicting the actual global temperature. There is no shortage of distinguished scientists screaming that global warming is a fraud.

Even if you believe the junk science of climate change, the CO2 emissions are concentrated in Asia. Reducing CO2 emissions in the U.S. at great cost makes no sense because the supposed problem is in Asia. The way to really reduce CO2 emissions is to replace fossil fuel electricity generation with nuclear generation. Nuclear power does not emit CO2 and it works at night when the sun is not shining and it works when the wind is not blowing. Further, there are great prospects for improving the cost and safety of nuclear power. The Times and the promoters of wind and solar ignore or demonize nuclear power.

The globe is not warming in the face of rapidly increasing CO2 levels, giving lie to the theory that CO2 will create a catastrophe, or create any problem at all. It is beyond question that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enhances agricultural productivity and greens deserts. Plants are hungry for CO2 and don’t need as much water if they have more CO2.

The Times makes the point that natural gas emits less CO2 than coal and is cheaper than coal. There is some truth in this but there are other issues that should be taken into account. Natural gas is a premium fuel of many uses. It burns cleanly, it is easily transported by pipeline, and due to fracking it has become very cheap. It is feasible to power automobiles with compressed natural gas, the main problem being a lack of refueling stations. Coal, on the other hand, is mainly useful for generating electricity. Modern coal plants are non-polluting because they have elaborate pollution controls. Our reserves of coal are vast, enough for many centuries, and are much greater than the reserves of natural gas. Natural gas is cheap, often nearly as cheap as coal per unit of energy. But the low price may be temporary because we will become an exporter of liquefied natural gas to lucrative markets in Asia and Europe. Natural gas now is used sparingly in transportation, but may be used more in the future due to its cost and clean burning advantages. The price of natural gas may increase substantially as supply and demand equalize.

Continue reading →