ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘Climate Action’ Flops at the G-7 By Robert Bryce

Posted By on August 27th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/g-7-meeting-climate-action-no-agreement/

Countries put their own economic growth first.

Despite President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to push climate change to the front of the discussion during the recently concluded G-7 meeting in France, the confab ended without a concrete agreement to take action on the issue.

Some of the blame was laid at the feet of President Donald Trump, who was “a no-show at a crucial session on climate change” today. While blaming Trump for the lack of progress on climate change might make for a good headline, the broader story is more complex. Indeed, a look at the numbers shows that the U.S. has slashed its coal use and cut its total greenhouse emissions more than any country in the G-7. It has also become a major supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) — which emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal during combustion — to other members of the G-7.

Before turning to those issues, it must be noted that international efforts to achieve major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have largely failed. While it’s true that more than 170 countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, that accord’s CO2 targets are not legally enforceable. (Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017.)

Why, despite the urgency of dealing with climate change, aren’t more countries making big cuts to their emissions? The most succinct explanation can be had by understanding what Roger Pielke Jr. has dubbed the Iron Law of Climate Policy: “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time.”

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The shabby depravity of CNN, NBC, MSNBC, the NYT, et al. By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on August 27th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_shabby_depravity_of_cnn_nbc_msnbc_the_nyt_et_al.html

Everyone paying attention to current events and the political wars that bedevil us all knows that CNN, NBC, and MSNBC are not honest brokers in any sense of the word.  For the eight years of the Bush administration, they verbally assaulted the president all day, every day.  George W. ignored their dishonest, calculated attacks in an effort to remain above the fray.  Bush gave these alleged news outlets a pass by refusing to take them on.  This was a mistake that Donald Trump learned not to repeat.  He has fought back from moment one, with a quick retort or tweet.  The same media and their mouthpieces slavishly idealized Barack Obama and overlooked and or covered up his many crimes and egregious errors in judgment.  For the left media crowd, Obama could have ordered a genocide, and they still would have idolized him.  Obama effectively did sanction the slaughter of Christians throughout the Middle East during his administration; he welcomed many thousands of Muslim refugees and refused refugee status to displaced Christians who were targeted by ISIS.  Christians have been effectively erased from the entire region.

The same media employed all the same tactics to candidate Trump even before he became the candidate.  They mocked him; late-night comics devoted their programs to deriding the man.  Once he became the candidate, they all doubled down and became downright vicious.  When it comes to venomous cruelty, no one tops the Left, in the media and in the entertainment sector.  When focused on a perceived enemy of their regressive progressiveness, they toss aside any sense of decency and go for the jugular.  They become everything we teach our children and grandchildren never to become: contemptible, intolerant snobs.  That is exactly who these persons with a media platform have become: malignant reprobates.  Nothing proves this more than their campaign to convince voters that Trump is unfit for office, mentally ill, etc.  They are dragging out the most Trump-deranged people to diagnose a man they’ve never met.  Obviously, every one of these so-called experts should have his license revoked for malpractice.  For example, Dr. Allen Frances’s guest spot on CNN suggests he may well have been dispatched from Duke for displaying severe mental health problems himself.  Physician, heal thyself!

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Objection engendered- child abuse in Australia

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/

Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital has some calm and soothing, matter-of-fact, trust-us-we’re-experts advice for the parents of boys who want to be girls and vice versa (emphasis added):

For others, living in their birth-assigned gender role is extremely distressing. In these cases, it is important for families to discuss with their child or teenager what they need to do to protect their physical and mental wellbeing, and consider seeking professional assistance.

For many transgender children and teenagers, the onset of puberty, with the development of secondary sex characteristics (e.g. breasts, changing voice) that don’t match their gender identity, is a particularly distressing time….

…. Once puberty has started, treatment options include the use of puberty blockers to stop the physical changes of puberty that the adolescent finds distressing.

1/ Known as Stage 1 treatment, puberty blockers are used mostly in early puberty. Stage 1 treatment is reversible.

2/ Stage 2 treatment involves using gender-affirming hormones (oestrogen or testosterone) to change the body to be more consistent with the teenager’s affirmed gender. Depending on the circumstances, this treatment can usually be started around the age of 16.

3/ Stage 3 treatment involves surgery, which is not commonly undertaken before adulthood.

According to US endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, the RCMH isn’t doing those kids any favours. Indeed, by his reckoning they are being made ill:

“I call it a development blocker — it’s actually causing a disease,” Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist associated with Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Rocklin, Calif., told PJ Media. The disease in question is hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. It occurs when the brain fails to send the right signal to the gonads to make the hormones necessary for development.

“We’re talking about what in nature is a rare condition. In the United States, if someone has this condition it’s going to be recognized and treated so the long-term results are unknown,” the doctor explained. “It’s an area that needs to be explored further.”

While endocrinologists — doctors who specialize in hormones and the endocrine system — are familiar with the disease and gladly treat it when a patient has been diagnosed, many of them are effectively causing their patients to contract the same disease in an attempt to affirm gender identity, Laidlaw said. “An endocrinologist might treat a condition where a female’s testosterone levels are going to be outside the normal range. We’ll treat that and we’re aware of metabolic problems. At the same time, an endocrinologist may be giving high levels of testosterone to a female to ‘transition’ her.”

The result, according to Laidlaw:

When people are given far more of the opposite sex hormone than their bodies can handle, they are at “increased risk for cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular death, deep vein thrombosis. They’ve looked at adults taking these hormones and have seen already these cardiovascular risks.”

When these drugs are administered to children, “one would presume it’s the same or even worse, in the long run.”

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The Impotence of the G7 By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/the-impotence-of-the-g7/

What, at this point, does the high-profile diplomatic summit purport to do?

At this year’s G7 Summit in Biarritz, France, the summit’s host, President Emmanuel Macron, gave each of the other leaders in attendance a watch made of recycled fishing nets and powered by solar energy. The watches, he explained, symbolized the group’s collective commitment to global sustainability and ocean conservation — though actually, they symbolize the summit’s pointlessness.

Was it always so? In 1975, the leaders of the then-G6 — France, West Germany, Japan, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. — met outside of Paris to tackle that year’s oil-related financial crisis. The next year, they became the G7, as Canada joined under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (the father of the country’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau). Soon after, the president of the European Commission was invited to attend, as were other countries. In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the U.S.S.R.’s Communist party, came to observe the summit in London, where it was hoped he’d learn a thing or two about democracy, liberty, and how to make friends and influence people.

Of course, the summit never had any real political or legal force behind it. But the idea was that — given the overwhelming economic clout of the G7, which originally made up almost 70 percent of the global economy, at least in nominal terms, though that has now fallen to around 50 percent — greater transparency on macroeconomics would better prepare and coordinate international markets.

Perhaps inevitably, the scope of the enterprise was soon extended beyond economics. It became a political power show, a festival of diplomacy, and a field day for journalists and political cartoonists around the world. In 1998, Bill Clinton allowed Russia into the club, where it remained until 2014, when it was booted for annexing the Crimea from Ukraine. The idea behind this was, presumably, to humiliate President Putin into changing his ways, which he evidently still hasn’t.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘The Squad’ Co-Sponsors Bill Claiming Israel Tortures Children, And Parrots Other Terrorist Propaganda By Warren Henry

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/26/squad-co-sponsors-bill-claiming-israel-tortures-children-terrorist-propaganda/

The claims made in the bill originate mostly from a group that could be described as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.

Many Americans now know that Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—two members of “the squad” of far-left congresswomen so much in the news—were recently barred from traveling to Israel to agitate for the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Fewer know all four members of “the squad,” including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, have co-sponsored a bill that accuses the Jewish state of torturing children. Fewer still know the claims made in the bill originate mostly from a group that could be described as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.

The so-called “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act“ was re-introduced in the House by Rep. Betty McCollum, whose congressional district neighbors Omar’s in Minnesota. Until recently, McCollum was considered a supporter of Israel, but a critic of its government.

In February, however, she condemned “[t]he right-wing, extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its apartheid-like policies,” adding “there are now members of Congress who are not willing to ignore the Israeli government’s destructive actions because they are afraid of losing an election.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Journalists Are Having A Meltdown Over Journalism Being Done To Them By Madeline Osburn

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/26/journalists-meltdown-journalism-done/

After years of doxxing innocent Americans for their political views, mainstream media journalists are now upset that their own racist and antisemitic tweets have been complied by conservative allies of President Trump.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Wright-Piersanti’s archived social media posts were part of the White House’s “aggressive operation to discredit news organizations.”

The Times report decried this tactic, arguing that targeting individuals is acceptable when journalists do it to other people, but not when other people do it to them.

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

The New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger said in a statement to the paper of record’s staff that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

Sulzberger’s concern over the intimidation of journalists fails to address and even excuses the racist and antisemitic views of his own staff, but also fails to acknowledge the mainstream media’s aggressive history of intimidating private individuals because they support the president or hold conservative political views.

Last February, a CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://spectator.org/why-michelle-obama-wont-run-in-2020/

Why Michelle Obama Won’t Run in 2020 David Catron

The Democrats are clearly losing confidence that their declared presidential candidates can beat President Trump in 2020. They tout polls showing that any of their top four candidates would win the general election were it held now, but only the most naïve take such hypothetical matchups seriously. Moreover, they can see that their leading candidate is so fuddled that he frequently forgets his talking points and even where he is on a given day, while his competitors are so far left of the mainstream that Trump would trounce them. This is why so many on the left have turned their desperate eyes to Michelle Obama.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/25/countering-progressive-nihilism/

Countering Progressive Nihilism Edward Ring

America’s homeless epidemic, along with a shocking rise in deaths from drug overdoses, stem from the same root cause: liberal progressive ideology. The seductive power of this ideology, which brims in equal measure with overwrought compassion for the less fortunate alongside fuming resentment towards the “privileged,” has earned it a dominant position in American culture.

Armed with the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear weaponry, but devoid of common sense or acceptance of hard truths, liberal progressive ideology defines the message and the agenda in public K-12 and higher education, entertainment, conventional media, social media, multinational corporations, powerful nonprofit organizations, and establishment politics. But the consequences of liberal progressive ideology are often nihilistic.

http://www.dickmorris.com/wheres-bill-lunch-alert/  VIDEO

WHERE’S BILL? DICK MORRIS

Old Hickory v. New Quackery Jim Goad

Marianne Williamson is easily the most entertaining candidate the Democrats have belched up this go-round, so let us gather to celebrate her campaign before it likely craps out on Wednesday and she gets disqualified from the third debate because she couldn’t even scratch together a measly 2% support in each of four prominent polls.

But Miss Marianne’s little flame flickered as brightly as it could for one brief and hilarious moment on the national stage, and despite the fact that even enough Democrats are sane enough never to vote for her, it cannot be denied that no one ever went further in politics by saying less than Marianne Williamson says.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Emmanuel Macron’s climate change virtue signaling The French president is addicted to the ecstasy of gratuitous self-righteousness Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://spectator.us/emmanuel-macron-climate-change-virtue/

“The outcry over ‘climate change’ (what we used to call ‘global warming,’ until the evidence that the globe was not, in fact, warming became incontrovertible) has very little to do with any genuine concern about the environment and everything to do with 1) the ecstasy of gratuitous self-righteousness that comes from repeating, mantra-like, clichés dear to one’s own tribe and 2) the weaponization of those sentiments in a program of anti-Western economic redistribution.  It’s a tactic that is repellent for its moralizing sanctimoniousness, and evil for its economic implications.”

It is also part of a larger war against Western, and especially American, thriving, but that may be taken as given whenever the subject is the preening exhibitionism of liberal elites.

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the ’emergency’, the ‘international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) ‘the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ ‘Our house is burning. Literally,’ Macron squeaked in a tweet Thursday, even as he elsewhere accused Bolsonaro of lying to him about Brazil’s effort to combat the great green phantom, ‘Climate Change.’

This took everyone, including Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, who was not present in Biarritz, by surprise. Bolsonaro swiftly fired back an angry, articulate response pointing out that 1) the Amazon was a treasured part of Brazil’s national identity (read: none of your business, Frenchie), 2) Brazil was devoting great resources, including military resources, to battling the fires, and 3) there were fires every year in the Amazon, fewer in wet years, more in drier years, which this was.

President Bolsonaro might have also pointed out that, far from there being a ‘record number’ of fires in the Amazon this year, there were actually far fewer this year than in many recent years as this chart shows.

Being of a more charitable disposition than I am, President Bolsonaro also forbore to point out that the picture Macron featured in his horror story depicted not a fire in 2019 but was in fact snapped by the American photojournalist Loren McIntyre in 1989.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

On climate, Trump says he won’t lose nation’s wealth to ‘dreams and windmills Michael Collins and John Fritze,

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/26/donald-trump-nations-wealth-wont-traded-dreams-and-windmills/2118191001/

BIARRITZ, France – President Donald Trump said Monday that his first priority is to maintain the nation’s wealth, not trade away that prosperity for climate initiatives that he described as amounting to “dreams and windmills.”

“It’s tremendous wealth,” Trump told reporters gathered at the G-7 summit in France. “I’m not going to lose that wealth. I’m not going to lose it on dreams and windmills, which, frankly, aren’t working too well.”

Trump’s remarks came after White House aides acknowledged he skipped a session of the G-7 meeting focused on climate, biodiversity and the health of oceans. The White House said the president was taking part in other meetings during that session. 

The president did not answer two specifics questions: Whether he still harbored skepticism about climate change and what he felt the U.S. and other countries should do about it. Before his election, Trump had described climate change a Chinese hoax. 

Trump has reportedly told aides that the meeting of world leaders has focused too intensely on climate and other environmental issues. White House officials have said the president wants the meeting to deal more with economic issues, and Trump pushed for and secured a session on Saturday focused on the global economy. 

“The United States has tremendous wealth,” Trump said, referring to the nation’s preponderance of natural gas. “I’ve made that wealth come alive.

Trump has been at odds with other members of the G-7, especially host France, after he announced in 2017 that the U.S. would formally withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Then-candidate Trump promised to withdraw the U.S. from the accord.

But Trump defended his environmental record on Monday, telling reporters that he was an “environmentalist.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is America about to adopt the Israeli prime minister’s 20-year-old plan for a durable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians? By Benjamin Netanyahu

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/290029/bibis-peace-plan

Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has now been compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies, the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have settled themselves.

While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will remain threatened by the destabilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic missiles and atomic weapons. Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the Arab world and the Jewish state.

Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world have still not had an irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that Israel has become vulnerable enough to attack.