EDUCATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Pulitzer Board Must Revoke Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Prize Peter Wood

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/pulitzer-board-must-revoke-nikole-hannah-jones-prize

The National Association of Scholars has agreed to host this public letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board. The letter calls on the Board to rescind the prize it awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones earlier this year. I am one of the 21 signatories.  A hard copy has been mailed to the Pulitzer Committee as well as a digital copy.

—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” That essay was entitled, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.”

When the Board announced the prize on May 4, 2020, it praised Hannah-Jones for “a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Note well the last five words. Clearly the award was meant not merely to honor this one isolated essay, but the Project as a whole, with its framing contention that the year 1619, the date when some twenty Africans arrived at Jamestown, ought to be regarded as the nation’s “true founding,” supplanting the long-honored date of July 4, 1776, which marked the emergence of the United States as an independent nation.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The final four weeks of the campaign will be fought over re-opening the economy By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/the_final_four_weeks_of_the_campaign_will_be_fought_over_reopening_the_economy.html

Sacrificing the economy, the education of our children, and our collective mental health for the purported purpose of slowing the spread of a disease that is survived by more than 99% of those under 70 who contract it is no longer tolerable, and President Trump is waging his presidential campaign on  ending the madness.

Here is the CDC’s best estimate of the lethality of COVID for each age cohort:

0–19 years: 0.00003
20–49 years: 0.0002
50–69 years: 0.005
70+ years: 0.054

Now that we know how to treat it, COVID is not something to panic over unless you are very old and already have health problems (comorbidities) that are very likely to shorten your expected lifespan even without COVID.

President Trump’s rapid recovery, despite being 74 and overweight (which caused the MSM to go insane, predicting his impending demise over the weekend), stands as dramatic evidence that the panic used to justify devastating the economy and closing schools is foolishly overblown.

YouTube screen grab.

Heather Mac Donald, writing in City Journal, sums up the false panic being peddled by the Democrats and their media handmaidens:

The media and Democratic establishments are in a frenzy of Schadenfreude over President Trump’s COVID diagnosis. Trump’s contracting the disease, they argue, discredits any coronavirus policy short of lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, outdoors as well as in. Trump is now “exhibit No. 1 for the failure of his leadership on coronavirus,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin toldthe New York Times.

By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden’s basement-bunker response has been vindicated, such commentators allege. Biden drove home his status as the country’s premiere symbol of safetyism on Friday by giving a masked and muffled speech in the vast outdoors of Grand Rapids. No one was within yards of him; Biden could not possibly have become infected or infected anyone else, since transmission in well-ventilated outdoor spaces is virtually nonexistent. Yet such displays of coronavirus virtue-signaling will now multiply exponentially, especially from masked television reporters speaking en plein air to a camera yards away.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Janet Levy-An International Team of Lawyers to Argue Biggest Court Case in History Against “Scamdemic”

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.brighteon.com/aa072975-9fe9-4606-8592-e5bd3c6373b6

The video below, features Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a seasoned “fraud-busting” attorney boarded in both California and Germany, who explains how the faulty Wuhan coronavirus PCR tests were adopted as a “diagnostic” tool and how a false sense of fear and panic were induced in the population in violation of international laws of crimes against humanity. Janet Levy

The 49 minute video is well worth a listen.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXVII Francis Menton

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-10-5-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-

It has been more than a year since I last added a post to this series. The previous post in the series, Part XXVI, appeared on August 20, 2019. For all of the prior twenty-six posts, go to this composite link.

There are two reasons for a new post at this time. The first is that there is some new work out from a guy named Tony Heller. The new work can be found at Heller’s website here, with a date of October 1. Heller also indicates that he intends to continue to add to and supplement this work. Heller is an independent researcher who particularly focuses on the subject of this series: alterations to past officially-reported government climate data to create an impression of warming that did not exist in the data as originally reported. Heller is quite skilled at going through reams of government climate data, and turning those data into useful graphs to demonstrate his points. However, in the past I have sometimes been frustrated with Heller’s work for not including sufficient links to enable a reader to verify that his assertions about data alteration are correct. Thankfully, in the current piece, Heller has corrected that issue, and provides the links so that you can see for yourself that the government has changed the data it previously reported in order to artificially enhance the apparent warming trend.

The second reason for a new post at this time is that President Trump has — finally! — hired two climate skeptics into positions of authority over the bureaucracy that compiles, and later alters, the climate data. On September 12, Trump named David Legates to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Observation and Prediction. And on September 21, Trump named Ryan Maue as Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is the main bureaucracy where the principal climate data are compiled, and is a part of the Department of Commerce. (Another agency, NASA, is also involved in these efforts.). Both Legates and Maue have been known as people who refuse to accept much of official climate orthodoxy. It is completely bizarre that these appointments would only occur less than two months before the election that could turn Trump out of office, but there you go.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Who Wants to Blow Up Our Constitution? (It’s Not Trump.) .By Charles Lipson

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/06/who_wants_to_blow_up_our_c

The most profound attacks on Donald Trump are that his presidency is illegitimate and that he wants to destroy our constitutional structure. The Democrats have leveled those accusations for four years, accompanied by charges he is a wannabe dictator, elected thanks to his good buddy, Vladimir Putin.

These frenzied charges, we now know, were invented and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then funneled to the U.S. government through the FBI, Department of Justice, and State Department. Meanwhile, the CIA and then the FBI were busy spying on the Trump campaign (and, later, in the FBI’s case, on the Trump presidency), trying to find “collusion” with Russia. Their relentless effort led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose partisan team knew almost immediately there was no proof of these damning allegations. They should have told the public immediately.

Instead, they spent the next two years trying — and failing — to catch President Trump on a “process” crime of obstructing justice, without any underlying crime to investigate. They were pursuing a person, not a crime, violating our most basic idea of legitimate law enforcement. Trump actually cooperated fully with the collusion investigation, providing millions of otherwise-privileged documents, but he didn’t bite on a personal interview designed to catch him in a purported false statement. (His promise to cooperate fully with Mueller’s collusion investigation was based on the special counsel’s explicit promise to complete the investigation quickly. Mueller’s team reneged on that assurance after they received all the White House documents and testimony they sought.)

Why bother trying to lure the president into a false-statement trap if you can’t indict him? Simple: because Mueller’s team, effectively led by his zealous deputy, Andrew Weissmann, wanted to help House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so she could impeach the president.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Leadership in a time of pandemonium Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump face similar challenges to their political survival Melanie Phillips

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/leadership-in-a-time-of-pandemonium?token

It is difficult, to put it mildly, to peer through the blinding blizzards of partisan mainstream media reporting and venomous malice on social media to detect what is actually happening in both American and British political life.

And in fairness to everyone seeking to explain it all, the almost daily shocks being produced by one extraordinary development after another mean that all previous political signposts have been demolished by the storm.

Like the north star, however, there’s one constant we should keep in sight as we try to decipher the fortunes of both US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson. That constant is why each of them was brought to power. 

Although the circumstances are obviously different, the reason was fundamentally the same. Millions of people, who had had it up to here with an arrogant and unaccountable political and cultural establishment intent upon destroying their right to live in a national home of recognisably shared, historic values and traditions and under a rule of law reflecting their own sovereign and democratic consensus, seized the opportunity to elect a leader who promised to uphold that right against that establishment.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum The ‘chemistry’ of anti-Israel propaganda This is not the first time that Ariel University has been targeted by left-wing academics who toe the Palestinian line.

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-chemistry-of-anti-israel-propaganda/

 When the prominent Switzerland-based chemistry journal Molecules recently announced that its special January 2021 issue would feature a paper from a researcher at Ariel University in Samaria, a group of scientists immediately protested.

Their response had nothing to do with the content of Mindy Levine’s study, however. No, the academics—led by 2018 Nobel Chemistry Prize laureate George Smith and Royal Society of Chemistry fellow Malcolm Levitt—did not concern themselves with their colleague’s work.

All that mattered to them was the mailing address of the institution of higher learning, where Levine heads a lab that engages in toxicant detection, environmental remediation and supramolecular organic chemistry.

In their letter to the editors of Molecules, the group—made up of academics who support Palestinian academics’ non-recognition of Ariel University—demanded that Levine’s article be nixed unless the location of her academic affiliation is “correctly and factually” edited.

But Levine, a new immigrant to Israel from the United States with a background from the University of Rhode Island, Columbia and MIT, had listed the school’s address as “Ariel University, 65 Ramat HaGolan Street, Ariel, Israel.”

The “chemical reaction” on the part of Smith, Levitt and their followers was rage born of believing that their scientific credentials award them automatic knowledge in fields far beyond their purview. They insisted, thus, that the address be changed to read: “Ariel University, illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel, Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Public’s Right to Know about the President’s Health vs. the President’s Right to Medical Confidentiality by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16600/president-health-confidentiality

But there is a countervailing right which few in the media have written about. All Americans have the right to medical confidentiality. This right is assured by federal law, state law, medical ethics and the long traditions of the medical profession. What a patient tells his doctor, or what the doctor observes from the patient, are confidential, subject only to a few limited exceptions.

Among these exceptions is the obligation of doctors to report threats to other people, such as a highly contagious disease. It also includes the obligations of doctors and other professionals to report when they learn of abuse of or by the patient. There is no explicit exception for high ranking public officials, including the president.

All current White Houses leak like sieves. Staff members develop quid pro quo relationships with the media: in exchange for leaking information, the media promises to treat them well. That is the reality of contemporary journalism.

Perhaps the law should be changed and government doctors should have their first obligation to the public. But such a change would come with a high cost: presidents would not disclose to these government doctors information that they did not want to be made public. That might have a negative impact on their medical treatment.

The pubic has a right to know the details of the president’s medical situation. But the president has the right to keep his medical information confidential. There is a conflict between these rights, even when they involve the president of the United States, who is a candidate for reelection. The reason the public has the right to know about the president’s medical history is self-evident. He is the most powerful person in the world and he is seeking a second term. Voters are entitled to know the truth about his medical condition. No one would dispute that.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

CIA Director Gina Haspel and the British Role in the Anti-Trump Plot by Chris Farrell

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16601/haspel-britain-trump-coup

In the next paragraph, [Washington Post reporter Scott] Shane notes breathlessly: “… Trump has accused the United Kingdom of conspiring with American intelligence to spy on his presidential campaign.”

President Trump certainly has made that claim, and one believes for very good reasons that seem to compound weekly.

Having the British run an aggressive intelligence collection operation against Team Trump targets, bypassing US legal prohibitions, and then laundering the intelligence “take” back to US officials via the UK-US liaison relationship is precisely something an “honorary UK desk officer” might be good and adept at accomplishing. Certainly, these subjects and questions deserve closer examination, without the phony prophylactic defense of grave warnings about “sources and methods.”

CIA Director Gina Haspel can answer all of those questions, and she does not even have to touch upon classified information to do so. The American public is due her answers.

We have raised and discussed serious matters of fact and questions about the role of CIA Director Gina Haspel in the Anti-Trump conspiracy. It appears Haspel (while serving as London Chief of Station from 2014 to early 2017) was an active, knowledgeable party to the efforts to target candidate Trump with an FBI-instigated foreign counterintelligence operation. That seditious conspiracy carried forward to a more sophisticated and aggressive plan to carry out a soft coup against President Donald J. Trump.

Looking back on news reporting concerning Haspel, we turn (with caution) to a Washington Post article from July 2019 by Scott Shane, titled: “The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump”. We are supposed to believe that Haspel and her office did not cooperate with the reporter for the article. Shane disclaims Haspel involvement by writing:

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Against Fear President Trump’s handling of his coronavirus diagnosis models positive masculinity—rational and unbowed. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on October 6th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-coronavirus-diagnosis-models-positive-masculinity

The media and Democratic establishments are in a frenzy of Schadenfreude over President Trump’s Covid diagnosis. Trump’s contracting the disease, they argue, discredits any coronavirus policy short of lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, outdoors as well as in. Trump is now “exhibit No. 1 for the failure of his leadership on coronavirus,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told the New York Times.

By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden’s basement-bunker response has been vindicated, such commentators allege. Biden drove home his status as the country’s premiere symbol of safetyism on Friday by giving a masked and muffled speech in the vast outdoors of Grand Rapids. No one was within yards of him; Biden could not possibly have become infected or infected anyone else, since transmission in well-ventilated outdoor spaces is virtually nonexistent. Yet such displays of coronavirus virtue-signaling will now multiply exponentially, especially from masked television reporters speaking en plein air to a camera yards away.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni claims that Trump’s infection proves that the country has been lax in its coronavirus response. “It is time, at long last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others as well as to ourselves,” he wrote on Saturday. “We cannot erase the mistakes made in America’s response to the coronavirus, but we can vow not to continue making them.”

“Be safer?” The United States has wiped out decades of hard-won prosperity by following the spirit-crushing injunction to “stay safe.” The lockdowns have destroyed the dreams of thousands of entrepreneurs and have put millions out of work, leaving cities like New York moribund ghost towns. The school closures are consigning millions of children worldwide to stunted lives due to delayed, if not now permanently deferred, acquisition of reading, writing, and socialization skills. Children are being inculcated into a culture of fear.