NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Position Vacant: An Antipodean DeSantis Peter Smith

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/01/position-vacant-an-antipodean-desantis/

When deaths have to be up-played. Whenever Trump can be blamed. Otherwise, here’s the latest from CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four co-morbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

We’ve recently learnt that half of those in hospital recorded as COVID patients have in fact entered hospital for other reasons. They were routinely tested and found to have the virus. It’s likely deaths, too, have been overstated and, to boot in Australia, have been offset by the drop in deaths from influenza-cum-pneumonia (IP).

To the end October, the latest figures available, deaths from IP were 1,816 in 2021, 1,877 in 2020 compared with an average of 2908 across 2015-19. The difference adds up to about the number of registered COVID deaths to the end October 2021. With a median age of death at around 85 years, it’s true to say that when you get to that age all bets are off.

Let’s not beat around the bush. This has been the greatest overreaction since the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were shot. Now healthy five-year-olds, with zero chance of succumbing to the virus, are being lined up to be injected with an mRNA vaccine, the long-term effects of which are unknown. With such abandonment of responsibility, conscience, decency and common sense, why think this will be over by Christmas? Middle Ages, Modern Ages, CVOID Ages.

Annastacia Palaszczuk’s keeping kids from school for two weeks to give them a better chance of getting the shot, before risking their lives in the classroom. Idiocy, yes. But she’s not as stupid as she acts. There’s a rat cunning at work among the elite and the political class. First, this week’s small example; second, last week’s.

Dominic Perrottet, what a disappointment (see below), says at a press conference on Monday that “over half” the patients in intensive care in NSW are unvaccinated. Half an hour or so later Scott Morrison says that Perrottet said that the patients in intensive care were “predominantly” unvaccinated. Is this an example of the noble lie that Ron DeSantis has rightly rejected in Florida? Or it is simply that today’s callow, ill-educated speech writers no longer have a facility with words?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Seattle Power Company Sued for Violating the Rights of Fish By Wesley J. Smith

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/seattle-power-company-sued-for-violating-the-rights-of-fish/?utm

I have been warning the green warriors that “nature rights” will someday come back to bite reneweable energy projects. For example, electricity-generating windmills kill millions of birds and bats. If these animals have the “inalienable right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve,” and if anyone can sue to enforce the rights of nature as nature-rights laws tend to provide, then lawsuits to shut down the windmills for violating birds’ rights is only a matter of time.

Seattle City Light is now under that very threat because of the electricity-generating dams it operates. Only instead of birds suing, it is fish — salmon to be specific. In a case brought by Native Americans, a court is being asked to declare that the rights of the fish are being violated under a nature rights legal theory. From the KUOW story:

Salmon can’t go to court, but the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe says the fish at the heart of its and other Northwest tribal cultures should have legal rights.

The tribe has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Tsuladxʷ in Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Court to assert those rights in the tribe’s traditional territory in Washington’s North Cascades. “These rights include, but are not limited to, the right to pure water and freshwater habitat; the right to a healthy climate system and a natural environment free from human-caused global warming impacts and emissions,” the suit states.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kazakhstan: Echoes of the Autumn of Sorrows by Amir Taheri

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18136/kazakhstan-sorrows

The United States gradual isolationism, starting with President Barack Obama and the closure of US bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, whetted the appetites of both China and Russia for greater influence in Central Asia as a whole.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has launched a long-term geostrategic campaign to regain its zone of influence in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, where Kazakhstan is the biggest prize.

[T]he Russian campaign has caused unease among Kazakhs who suddenly realize that their ethnic-Russian fellow citizens hold a much higher percentage of plum positions in civil service and the military than their actual numbers would warrant.

Until earlier this month, Kazakhstan, the largest of Central Asian republics to become independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire 30 years ago, appeared the most stable entity in the region.

BOOKS Comments turned off

What the Hell, and Worse America contains multitudes. And even if we don’t have a truly common language, it pays to know how truly common our language can be. By Peter W. Wood

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/what-the-hell-and-worse/

A review of  “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever,” by John McWhorter (Penguin, 288 pages, $21.49).

In my freshman year of college, way back in 1971, I took a course on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from a British-accented and British-named Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite. The course introduced me to an abundance of 16th and 17th century playwrights who were not named William Shakespeare, upon whom Professor Satterthwaite cast so intense a light that we would be blinded to other sources of illumination. So we plunged into Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, and many others. Their plays remain vivid to me even now—not that Professor Satterthwaite was an especially good teacher. He was a digressive fellow who would meet his students at home in his private study while he sucked on his pipe and told stories, many of them with a blue tinge.

He drew a key distinction between what he called the “comedy of f___ and the comedy of s___.” Or to be a little more delicate, sex comedies and potty humor. He meant all comedy is one or the other. I have never been clear whether that’s a good distinction. (Can’t a comedy indulge both? Isn’t there anything else?) But I vividly remember how Professor Satterthwaite relished saying those two words. Of course, at age 17 I had heard them plenty of times before. I attended public school in Pittsburgh neighborhoods where everyday student vocabulary had more of the blast furnace than those two words. But I never heard them rolled trippingly from the tongue of a cultivated Englishman extolling fine literature. That was new. 

The genial and even more cultivated John McWhorter recently delivered a short and somewhat alarming book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. McWhorter teaches linguistics (and lots of other subjects, including music history) at Columbia University, but I think it safe to say he is best known as a linguist, and one who has charmed his way through 20 books and hundreds of essays. Nine Nasty Words continues his charm offensive—with emphasis on both those words. The charm he possesses is that of a relaxed and convivial conversationalist, a reincarnation or an avatar of the late Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite, but without the British affectation and with a great deal more to teach. He brings his credentials as a black American to the table but not in the fraught tone of claiming special insight. Of special insights he has plenty, but they reflect scholarship not racial privilege. But his charm offense does have an offensive part, and it too is also a bit Satterthwaitian: McWhorter delights in naughty words. Or at least most of them.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden: Deep State Puppet Will the country be able to survive three more years of a deep state conspiracy presided over by an angry, incompetent, and increasingly senile puppet? By Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/joe-biden-deep-state-puppet/

I almost feel sorry for Joe Biden. 

The emphasis, I hasten to add, is on the adverb. Perhaps, if he didn’t make me feel thoroughly sorry for the United States of America, my sympathy for him would be unalloyed. But even many in Biden’s own party are aghast at his performance as president. 

It’s almost a matter of smell, of that sixth sense that alerts sensitive souls to impending disaster. Animals somehow know when an earthquake is coming, even before the ground begins to tremble. The far-left activist Stacey Abrams is well endowed with those antennae, which is why she invented “scheduling issues” and gave the president’s speech in Atlanta a miss last week. The aroma of events like that have a way of clinging to someone, and Abrams had the good sense to know that Joe Biden on “voting rights” and the run-up to Martin Luther King Day was likely to be a redolent affair. 

In the event, it was much worse than she, or anyone else for that matter, could have foreseen. Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff called it the “the worst presidential speech in modern history.” But Paul is a generous man. There was really no need for that qualifying “modern.” Paul mentions Jimmy Carter’s disastrous “malaise speech” of 1979 as a contender for the palm. That speech was indeed horrible. It was one of the things that lost Carter the election the next year. But Biden’s speech was far worse. Carter’s speech was a bizarre combination of cramped, hectoring moralism, much of it lifted from Christopher Lasch, and a repellent, cardigan-clad sentimentality and faux folksiness. 

Carter’s speech, however, was not mendacious. It was simply wrong. Biden’s, on the contrary, was a veritable tissue of incontinent hyperbole, partisan posturing, and outright lies. Even Dick Durbin, Democratic lapdog though he is, acknowledged that Biden “went a little too far in his rhetoric.” You think so, Dick?

Forget about Biden’s description of the January 6 protest at the Capitol as “an attempted coup . . . against the legally expressed will of the American people.” That was insane, granted, but what will be remembered is his over-the-top, shark-jumping hyperbole “I ask every elected official in America,” Biden said in one of the most cringe-making moments of the speech, “How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Oh, dear. It took about 15 seconds for House Republicans to produce a newspaper clipping in which Biden bragged about being praised by George Wallace. That was back when then-Senator Biden was a proud segregationist. 

Mitch McConnell was waiting offstage with the ax: “He shouted that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace,” McConnell said. “If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well, you’re Jefferson Davis.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden administration’s bizarre response to the Texas hostage crisis By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_biden_administrations_bizarre_response_to_the_texas_hostage_crisis.html

On Saturday afternoon, a man claiming to be the brother of the Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui (aka “Lady al Qaeda”) stormed a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and took four people hostage. The resulting standoff lasted for several hours before all four hostages escaped or were freed and the hostage-taker killed. During the event, the Biden administration once again showed itself to be completely tone-deaf, issuing a bizarre, clinical tweet that didn’t even mention that the entire event revolved around al Qaeda-related genocidal antisemitism.

Congregation Beth Israel was almost empty on Saturday because it was live-streaming its Sabbath services. Because of that live-streaming, everyone heard an Islamist enter the synagogue shortly after 10:00 a.m. and take hostage the four people who were there, including the rabbi. He insisted that the government release Siddiqui, a fanatic al Qaeda supporter who was imprisoned in Texas for 86 years after she shot at U.S. service members and was found to have actively plotted mass-casualty al Qaeda attacks.

In the early evening, one hostage was released. Then, shortly before 10 p.m., the 12-hour-long nightmare ended with a frightening denouement. Cameras caught two of the hostages racing out of the building as the terrorist followed them out, aiming his gun at them before he retreated into the building. Soon after, a SWAT team stormed the building, killing the Islamist and freeing the remaining hostage:

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Exposed: The Selective Bigotry of the Campus Diversity Industry By Henry Kopel

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/exposed_the_selective_bigotry_of_the_campus_diversity_industry.html

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – or “DEI” – is now big business across American campuses.  A 2021 Heritage Foundation study found that the average American college employs 45 full-time DEI administrators.  With a reported average salary of $79,400 per DEI staffer, the average college DEI budget exceeds $3.57 million.  Hence across more than 4,000 colleges nationally, America’s total college DEI bill tops $14 billion.

One would hope that such massive investments yield tangible gains in the DEI bureaucracies’ self-described mission, namely, assuring an inclusive campus environment for all students.  Unfortunately, a new study shows that the campus DEI industry not only fails this test, but also – at least towards one minority group – actively subverts its stated goal.

The study, released by Heritage just a month ago, examined the public social media statements of over 700 diversity administrators from 65 colleges.  It revealed a tsunami of extreme and false denunciations of Israel and its supporters.  Of the DEI staffers’ frequent mentions of Israel, 96 percent consisted of libelous indictments, “[f]requently accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes.”

One diversity administrator “liked” and re-tweeted this message: “Wtf is a liberal Zionist? What’s next? Liberal Nazi? Liberal colonizer? Liberal murderer?”  Another tweeted, in an echo of the medieval blood libels that incited bloody violence against Jews, “israel has a particular loathing for children. they target them with violence specifically and intentionally every single day.”

Many DEI staffers’ tweets called for Israel’s outright elimination, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”  Apparently, those falsely charged with genocide must themselves be targeted for genocide.  Other DEI tweets denounced U.S. supporters of Israel, including a conspiratorial indictment of a “vast philanthropic-lobbying complex in the US that works tirelessly to present Israelis as benevolent [and] peace-loving . . . [while] in actual Israel no one bothers with the pretense.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why Joe Biden Should Leverage The Abraham Accords To Bring Stability To The Middle East By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/01/why-joe-biden-should-leverage-the-abraham-accords-to-bring-stability-to-the-middle-east/

This week’s announcement that a bipartisan group of House and Senate members have created an Abraham Accords Caucus to encourage more Arab-Israeli normalization agreements reminds us that the accords have the potential to reshape the region’s politics, economics, diplomacy, and military relationships.

The question is whether, in the months to come, the Biden administration will view the accords as an opportunity to promote America’s regional interests or as a distraction from its other challenges.

The accords – the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements that Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in late 2020 and subsequently with Morocco – are having a noticeable positive impact on the nations involved and, as a result, are raising prospects for wider Israeli-Arab peace.

Airlines are flying back and forth from Israel to those Arab states, tourism and people-to-people exchanges are flourishing, and trade between Israel and the UAE, in particular, is soaring. In recent months, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid attended the opening of Israel’s new embassy in Manama; Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett visited UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi; Israel and Morocco signed an agreement to nourish security cooperation; and the UAE and Bahrain joined the United States and Israel in a naval exercise in the Red Sea.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Calculating The Full Costs Of Electrifying Everything Using Only Wind, Solar And Batteries Francis Menton

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=7d68230f86

For several years now, advocates of “decarbonizing” our energy system, along with promoters of wind and solar energy, have claimed that the cost of electricity from the wind and sun was dropping rapidly and either already was, or soon would be, less than the cost of generating the same electricity from fossil fuels. These claims are generally based on a metric called the “Levelized Cost of Energy,” which is designed to seem sophisticated to the uninitiated, but in the real world is completely misleading because it omits the largest costs of a system where most generation comes from intermittent sources. The large omitted costs are those for storage (batteries) and transmission. But as we now careen recklessly down the road to zero emissions, how much will these omitted costs really amount to?

A guy named Ken Gregory has recently (December 20, 2021, updated January 10, 2022) come out with a Report at a Canadian website called Friends of Science with the title “The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” A somewhat abbreviated version of Gregory’s Report has also appeared at Watts Up With That here. Gregory provides a tentative number for the additional storage costs that could be necessary for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar. That number is $433 trillion. Since the current U.S. annual GDP is about $21 trillion, you will recognize that the $433 trillion represents more than 20 times full U.S. annual GDP. In the post I will give some reasons why Gregory may even be underestimating what the cost would ultimately prove to be.

First, some background. A huge and, I would submit, obvious engineering issue that permeates the question of powering an electrical grid with only intermittent sources is how to assure that there is always sufficient electricity available to meet demand at every minute throughout the year. Somebody needs to carefully study actual generation from wind and sun hour by hour (maybe even minute by minute) throughout a year, and then calculate exactly how much storage it’s going to take to get through all the sun and wind droughts that occur during what could be long periods of calm, overcast, hot, cold and nights. This kind of work does not involve sophisticated mathematics, but it does involve detailed effort to create an appropriate spreadsheet and find and carefully input reams of publicly available data. To their incredible shame, none of the genius planet saviors who are imposing decarbonization on us ever undertake this task, and for that matter they have never even admitted it is an issue, as far as I have been able to determine. Take a look, for example, at New York’s Climate Action Scoping Plan, or California’s AB32 Climate Change Scoping Plan, or for that matter any of the regulations and Executive Orders coming out of the federal government, and you just never find any mention of this subject.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kachelman: Those Crying Out “Conspiracy” Are the Ones Who Need to be Arrested, Adjudicated, and Punished. By Jim Hoft

Posted By on January 16th, 2022

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/kachelman-crying-conspiracy-ones-need-arrested-adjudicated-punished/

I’m speaking to the Ruling Elite…YOU scornfully claim I wear a tinfoil hat and idle the time away in delusional dreaming of imagined political catastrophes. YOU scoff at my concerns and dismiss my patriotism with comic memes. YOU casually prance from day to day as if everyone and everything in this world is at your “beck and call.” YOU utter illegal and absurd mandates and heartedly condemn non-compliance but then you hold yourself aloof from the compliance you demand from others. YOU claim I am obsessed with conspiracies that are unfounded and serve as fodder for insurrectionist protests when in reality it is YOU fomenting the conspiracies. YOUR childish antics are deserving of the playground retaliatory quip: “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on YOU!” The true conspiratorial insurrectionist is YOU!

The most brutal political practice ever weaponized is the planting, nurturing and then oppression of “conspiracies.” Even though this word “conspiracy” has been publicized by today’s political Elite, it is not novel. From the Beginning of time conspiratorial thoughts have attacked the Rule of Law. In the Garden, the Devil suggested the Forbidden Tree was off-limits because God Almighty wanted to keep mankind different from Deity.

From the Beginning of time conspiracy has been used as leverage to further the agenda of the Elite to assure more power and greater riches. This evil ambition is not confined to any geographical borders, language, ethnic race, or political inclination. Power is possessed and ambition wants more and more; seeking gain through fear, intimidation and false accusations.