ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

As Renewables Move to Overtake Gas, Here’s a Pipeline to Paralysis by Vince Bielski

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/05/28/as_renewables_move_to_overtake_gas_a_pipeline_to_paralysis_123781.html

The embattled Atlantic Coast Pipeline begins its run in West Virginia. The steel tube built to ferry 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day weaves underground through mountain terrain toward its destination two states away in North Carolina. Then it stops, after only 30 miles but many millions of dollars into its journey.  

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline starts in West Virginia, but when and where it will ever finish has been thrown into doubt by a debate over how long it’s necessary to burn natural gas.

The most expensive natural gas pipeline project in America was halted two years ago after a federal appeals court yanked a permit that allowed it to cross two national forests, but the controversy rages on. The central issue is climate change – but in a sign of how much the debate has changed, this is not a battle between believers and deniers. Almost everyone, including CEOs, lawmakers and Wall Street analysts, agrees on the need to transition to renewable energy.

The fight is about how long it’s necessary to burn natural gas – a comparatively clean but growing source of atmospheric warming – before wind, solar and other clean energy can power America. In the rapidly changing economics of power, cheap natural gas –  once a wonder fuel enabling the shuttering of hundreds of dirtier coal plants nationwide – is itself being challenged by low-cost renewable energy, raising doubts in the minds of some over the need for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline at all.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Let the Sun Shine In: Florida has proven that a measured, evidence-based response to reopening works. Michael Hendrix

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/florida-evidence-based-reopening-working

For a moment in April, the Internet tried to cancel Florida. Photos showing crowds flocking to Jacksonville Beach amid the Covid-19 pandemic brought the hashtag #FloridaMorons to the top of Twitter. The media eagerly spun scenes of ignorant spring breakers endangering themselves and others. Nearly two months after America’s first case of coronavirus, here was Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, joining neighboring state Georgia’s “experiment in human sacrifice” by letting locals lift restrictions on their own.

Nearly a month later, Jacksonville’s Duval County reports new Covid-19 hospitalizations in the single digits. Rates of hospitalizations, cases, and deaths remain steady across Florida. So far, fewer Floridians have died of the novel coronavirus than in New York’s nursing homes alone (2,259 compared with 5,800, at least). More than half of the state’s known cases of Covid-19 are found in just four South Florida counties—the top out-of-state destinations for fleeing New Yorkers. As Politico recently concluded, “Florida just doesn’t look nearly as bad as the national news media and sky-is-falling critics have been predicting for about two months now.”

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about mitigating Covid-19, but Florida’s approach—a decentralized health response with targeted lockdowns and quarantines reinforced by voluntary social distancing—appears to have worked. Other populous states adopting this approach, such as Tennessee, have seen similar success. Governor DeSantis’s experience suggests that it is possible to keep a lid on the coronavirus even while gradually reopening.

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Why Does the CDC Think the COVID-19 Fatality Rate Is So Low, and Why Won’t It Tell Anyone? By Robert VerBruggen

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-does-the-cdc-think-the-covid-19-fatality-rate-is-so-low-and-why-wont-it-tell-anyone/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm

Last week I was searching the Internet for some COVID-19 statistic or other, and I came across a new CDC website. The site featured some numbers the federal government is using to model the spread of the epidemic. One in particular caught my eye: 0.4 percent, the “current best estimate” of the disease’s “case fatality rate.” The document also said that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, which suggests the infection fatality rate is just 0.26 percent.

These numbers struck me as low for several reasons. For one thing, the virus has already killed 0.2 percent of all New Yorkers, and obviously a much higher percentage of those who’ve actually been infected in the city. For another, if we’ve had 100,000 deaths nationwide and a CFR of 0.4 percent, that means we’ve had 25 million symptomatic cases; including cases without symptoms, more than 10 percent of the entire country has been infected, which seems out of sync with what we’re hearing from serology tests. Individual studies and reviews of the evidence tend to put the infection fatality rate somewhere around 0.5 to 1 percent, though there’s at least one dissenting review that puts it lower (while managing not to include any studies finding a fatality rate above 0.5 percent, of which there are plenty).

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Spread of the Debt Virus By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/national-debt-washington-postponing-frightening-choices/

What cannot go on much longer soon probably won’t.

The current U.S. budget deficit could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. The massive borrowing is being driven both by prior budget profligacy and by a hurried effort by the Donald Trump administration to pump liquidity into a quarantined America.

The shutdown has left the country on the cusp of a self-inflicted economic collapse not seen since the Great Depression.

Americans may soon have to service a staggering national debt of about $30 trillion — nearly $100,000 of debt for every American.

Democrats and Republicans can blame each other, either for spending too much or for too little taxation or both. But both sides will agree that managing such an astronomical debt requires several frightening choices.

One, Americans would be forced to live with permanent near-zero interest rates, or perhaps even negative interest rates.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Raised In Unreality Tabitha Korol

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://www.trevorloudon.com/2020/05/raised-in-unreality/

This is another in a series of children’s propagandist storybooks distributed to libraries nationwide and in other countries, another facet of the many war strategies used against the west, overtly about Israel, but covertly about changing opinions and accepting Islam.  The facade of victimhood is usually at play; one need only be alert to recognize how it’s employed.  

*****

Tasting the Sky, by Ibtisam Barakat, is a story told through the memories of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl in Ramallah, West Bank, the heartland of Biblical Israel and known through the centuries as Samaria.  it is categorized to be read by Middle Graders, ages 6 and up, who know nothing of the region’s history.   Without guidance, analysis, and clarification, they would conclude that Israel is the interloper and Palestinians the natives, and by extension, western civilization is evil.  This is Islamic indoctrination, inappropriate for distribution.

It begins with a sketchy historical note that the conflict over the State of Israel, the background of the story, continues to this day, but the conflict’s origin is ignored.  For over fourteen centuries, Arabs have been following Mohammed’s decrees by attacking and slaughtering the Jews within the land and brutalizing Christians, Romans, Persians, Ethiopians, Berbers, Turks, Visigoths, Franks, Egyptians, Indians, and more, elsewhere.  Unable to deny 1400 years of Jewish presence in the land, the Arabs embellish the discord with lies of shared history, prophets, and archaeology.  But the land has only ever been the ancestral homeland of the Jews, who reestablished their national independence in Israel after 2,000 years, its legality endorsed by the United Nations, in 1948.  Israel also received the recognition of Yusaf Diya al-Khaldi Mayor of Jerusalem (1899), Lord Robert Cecil (1918), Emir Faisal, leader of the Arab World (1919); and Sir Winston Churchill (1920).

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

After the lockdown, the social breakdown

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://spectator.us/after-lockdown-social-breakdown-minneapolis-george-floyd-riots/

It should go without saying that, in a civilized society, rioting is unacceptable. Ransacking stores and setting fire to buildings is wrong. Beating up ladies in wheelchairs is not a legitimate expression of grievance. These truths ought to be self-evident. Somehow, for large sections of the commentariat, they are not.

The violence has rocked Minneapolis. Not wanting to be left out, Black Lives Matter agitators in Los Angeles have started causing trouble, too. Now armed vigilante squads are forming to protect businesses from being trashed. After the lockdown, the social breakdown. Isn’t 2020 fun?

The riots have been triggered by the circulation of shocking footage showing police officers brutalizing an unarmed black man. But that outrage has been perpetuated and exploited by antifa thugs who specialize in stoking up resentment in order to smash up the streets.

It’s a sign of how decadent our society is becoming that the pattern of these riots is now so predictable as to be almost boring. Black man is killed by cops. There’s outrage and demands for political change to make society less racist. Riots ensue. Then agonized debates about racial equality in America.

People in the media know the script of by heart. Idiot worthies get a kick out of inciting violence by pretending to appeal for justice. ‘How long will we go for Blue on Black Crime before we strike back?,’ asked Ice Cube, the rapper and idiot. Other celebrities put out videos about overcoming racist oppression. Channels insist on calling rioters ‘protesters’, as if looting serves some noble cause. Authorities start to talk in platitudes. ‘Being black in America should not be a death sentence,’ said Mayor Jacob Frey, as if that was a bold and controversial statement.

“The police have to understand that this is the climate they have created,” said one ‘protester’ to CBS.

Really? The video of poor George Floyd, a suspected fraudster, suffocating under a police officer’s knee is disturbing. The images show something vile taking place. And since we started with what should be obvious, let’s add: police brutality must be condemned and punished. But the antifa mobs who are orchestrating the smashing up of stores are not interested in fairness. They are thrilled by carnage.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Gallup Poll Shows That No One Thinks the Media Is Doing a Good Job During the Pandemic By Rick Moran

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/27/gallup-poll-shows-that-no-one-thinks-the-media-is-doing-a-good-job-during-the-pandemic-n433478

“When the American people needed a competent, informed, unbiased media the most, they didn’t get it.”

No one trusts the media. Not left, not right, not those who believe themselves to be centrists. So this Gallup-Knight Foundation survey shouldn’t surprise us when both sides believe the media isn’t doing a good job informing the public of the pandemic.

Also not surprisingly, there is a vast difference in perceptions from the public on coronavirus coverage depending on one’s political partisanship.

The survey shows that Democrats believe the media is downplaying the severity of the crisis while Republicans believe the media is exaggerating the dangers.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Cuomo’s Coronavirus Personae All Fail the Statesmanship Test By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/28/cuomos-coronavirus-personae-all-fail-the-statesmanship-test/

However much past policy decisions were taken in good faith, they must now be reversed for the sake of human life. To dodge political accountability by invoking science is not leadership, it is cowardice.

Anyone who has dipped into Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus press briefings knows that the New York governor relishes his variegated personae.

There is the ethnic Cuomo, who, we have learned repeatedly, enjoyed spaghetti and meatball Sunday dinners in his Queens childhood home.

Then we have Cuomo the family man, now belatedly bonding with his daughters as they shelter together in place, as we have also repeatedly learned.

Cuomo, the dutiful son, broadcasting to millions of viewers an intimate Zoom chat with his mother on Mother’s Day.

Then there is Cuomo, the righteous champion of human life, berating the Trump Administration for not immediately sending New York State 30,000 ventilators. “You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die!” he exclaimed heatedly on April 23. (As it turned out, New York never used the thousands of ventilators it had already stockpiled and it sent its many surplus machines to other states, where the ventilators also sat unused.)

Don’t forget Cuomo, the regal recipient of tribute, whether from one Samir Bhatt, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London. “Governor, it’s a professional honor to work with you,” Bhatt told Cuomo via Zoom on May 18. “Your state has already shown what can be achieved when policies are driven by science”), or from the governors of neighboring states who on May 3 offered a similarly effusive assessment for Cuomo’s performance. Imperial College was the source of the disastrous coronavirus model that sent the world economy hurtling into depression.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Just How Exaggerated Is The COVID-19 Death Count?

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/28/just-how-exaggerated-is-the-covid-19-death-count/

As the “official” tally of COVID-19 deaths tops 100,000 in the U.S., we keep hearing how that number is likely a low-ball estimate. But there’s far more evidence that the death count has been knowingly exaggerated – possibly by a very wide margin.

A recent Seattle Times article pretty much lays out the charade going on.

The headline reads: “Washington state’s actual coronavirus death toll may be higher than current tallies, health officials say.”

But the story itself leads one to the exact opposite conclusion.

Well down in the article, the reporter reveals that:

“The rapid onslaught of this coronavirus forced officials to part from their normal process of counting deaths. … Their goal was to get the data out as quickly as possible, ‘in near-real time so immediate decisions could be made to protect the health of Washingtonians.’”

The story goes on to say that the state’s dashboard “reflects anyone who died, that tested positive for COVID, irrespective of cause of death.” (Emphasis added.)

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Progressive ‘Brights’ Are Pretty Dim The current virus crisis, the utopian faith — and the road lined with mountains of human corpses. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 28th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/progressive-brights-are-pretty-dim-bruce-thornton/

“Brights” is a term that became popular nearly 20 years ago to describe self-proclaimed rationalists who reject religion, practical wisdom, and tradition, and instead rely solely on “science” for understanding and solving social and political problems. Evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins defined “brights” as “Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal.”

The current virus crisis has exposed the dangers of such hubris. Federal and state governments have put in place exorbitantly costly polices such as the extreme lockdown, guided by provisional knowledge about the coronavirus based on incomplete data. In fact, the lockdown policy has cost lives; New York mayor Andrew Cuomo, a proponent of the lockdown, back in early March was “shocked” and “surprised” that people “sheltering at home” had contracted the virus anyway and comprised the majority of those who died. The deep recession that has followed the lockdown has also cost lives, and will cost many thousands more as the effects of lost jobs and isolation take their toll over the coming years.

Once again, the “bright” progressives’ “science-based” policies have collided with the complexity of the human condition.

The “brights’” claim that only the material world is real started to spread over 200 years ago with the Enlightenment. A hundred years later it became the controlling idea behind technocratic progressivism, which holds that the “human sciences” can understand the human world accurately enough to manipulate and improve it as much as the hard sciences’ and the technologies they create did the material world. So we hear from progressives about “science-based policies,” calls to be guided by “science” and to defer to its authority, and dismissal of skeptics and critics of their policies as “deniers,” “flat-earthers” and “young-earthers” who believe cavemen rode dinosaurs.