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VAN STRIKES CROWD IN GERMANY

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

BERLIN — Authorities say a van crashed into a crowd Saturday outside a popular bar in the German city of Muenster, killing two people and injuring 20 others. The driver of the vehicle shot and killed himself after the crash, local police said. Six of the injured are listed in critical condition.

It’s not yet clear who the suspect is or what the motive is. Police said they are examining reports that other suspects may have fled the crash scene.

The incident is being treated as terrorism, but the suspect’s identification has not yet been transferred to the U.S., a U.S. intelligence source told CBS News.

Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, said the driver was a German citizen. Reul stressed the investigation is at an early stage but said “at the moment, nothing speaks for there being any Islamist background.”

“We are investigating in all directions,” he explained, according to the Associated Press. Reul said two people were killed in the crash, lowering the previous figure provided by police.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports that the suspect’s apartment was being searched for possible explosives.

On Twitter, local police warned residents to “avoid the area near the Kiepenkerl pub” in the city’s historic downtown area where a large-scale police operation was underway.

Police said a suspicious object was found in the van and they’re still examining it to see if it is dangerous. They told German news agency dpa that the object was the reason why a large area around the scene was sealed off after the crash.

Residents said they were enjoying the first warm afternoon in the area that features many shops and cafés, CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi said on CBSN. People were outside enjoying themselves, many of them college students, enjoying the weather.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Klimate-Change Kooks Still At It By Michael Walsh

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

Stormy Daniels may come and she may go, but the navel-gazing Henny-Pennys of the Left want you to know that “climate change” is still like totally a thing:

A record-cold “ Arctic Blast” is set to hit the East Coast this weekend. And undoubtedly, some people will point to it and say that it proves global warming isn’t for real. That’s totally false: categorically, definitely, unequivocally, scientifically false. And yet it’s made over and over and over again by climate denialists and their paid-for politicians in Washington.

Insert obligatory Trump-bashing here. Then:

Here, then, is the definitive list of four reasons that cold winters do not disprove global warming.

Are you ready for No. 1?

1. Climate Is Personality, Weather Is a Mood

The most important thing to remember, when it comes to climate change, is that it is never possible to trace any single weather event—hurricane, cold snap, dry spell—to climate change. As University of Georgia geography professor John Knox puts it, climate is personality; weather is mood.

In other words, the relevant data for climate change are long-term trends, not short term phenomena (generally, climatologists look at thirty year averages). And there’s no doubt about those trends. According to NASA, the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Based on carbon samples, the NOAA says that the last three decades have, on average, been the warmest on 1,000 years.

Remember, this is from the “party of science.” Next, we back away from the old hotness, “global warming,” and wrap our arms around the new hotness, “climate disruption.” What happened to “climate change,” you ask? Well, “disruption” is so much less neutral, and so much more… accusatory:

The Earth’s climatic system is extremely complicated. And so while the core feedback loop of climate change is simple— more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps more heat, like glass traps heat in a greenhouse—its effects are anything but. Some parts of the world get hotter, others get colder. And some are thrown into chaos. CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA Comments turned off

Shock: Facebook Is Tracking You Even If You’re Not on Facebook By Phil Baker

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

Facebook’s problems just keep accumulating, drip by drip—or more like splash by splash. It’s now been discovered that Facebook not only collects and uses the personal data of its members but also collects the data of those who never signed up for Facebook.

So if you’re one of those who blames Facebook users for allowing their personal data to be compromised, don’t be so smug. Facebook may be sharing your personal data as well.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, discovered that, although he never joined Facebook or any other social network, Facebook has a detailed profile on him.

Facebook obtains information from those not on Facebook in two different ways: from other Facebook users and by tracking people who visit other other sites on the web.

When people sign up for Facebook, they’re encouraged to upload their contacts to make it easier for Facebook to connect them with their friends. That allows Facebook to access personal contact information for people who never signed up for the platform or gave their permission to share their information. Facebook knows that these contacts are friends of the new Facebook user, and can start compiling additional details on these non-members.

Gillmor explained, “I received an email from Facebook that lists the people who have all invited me to join Facebook: my aunt, an old co-worker, a friend from elementary school, etc. This email includes names and email addresses — including my own name — and at least one web bug designed to identify me to Facebook’s web servers when I open the email.” He added, “Facebook records this group of people as my contacts, even though I’ve never agreed to this kind of data collection.”

“Similarly, I’m sure that I’m in some photographs that someone has uploaded to Facebook — and I’m probably tagged in some of them. I’ve never agreed to this, but Facebook could still be keeping track.”

Facebook also tracks individuals when they visit other websites. Whenever they click a “like” button on the website, that information often gets fed back to Facebook, along with a list of the websites visited and any Facebook-specific cookies the browser might have collected. Facebook calls this a “third-party request.” As individuals do this over time, Facebook is able to accumulate a detailed profile, again, even though they never signed up for a Facebook account.

Now you might think, so what? Facebook could not possibly know who the person is. Gillmor notes that “the profiles Facebook builds on non-users don’t necessarily include so-called ‘personally identifiable information’ (PII) like names or email addresses, but they do include fairly unique patterns.”

He then conducted a test. “Using Chromium’s NetLog dumping, I performed a simple five-minute browsing test last week that included visits to various sites — but not Facebook,” he wrote. “In that test, the PII-free data that was sent to Facebook included information about which news articles I was reading, my dietary preferences, and my hobbies,” said Gillmor. “Given the precision of this kind of mapping and targeting, ‘PII’ isn’t necessary to reveal my identity. How many vegans examine specifications for computer hardware from the ACLU’s offices while reading about Cambridge Analytica?”

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Media Goes Nuts Over Pruitt’s Travel Costs, Fails To Notice His Predecessors Spent Much More By Bre Payton

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

In a series of tweets, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel explained why the media freakout over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s travel expenses is a bunch of hooey.

In the past week, multiple media outlets have published pieces freaking out over Pruitt’s travel expenses after it was discovered the EPA administrator flew first class on the taxpayer’s dime as a security precaution after he received multiple death threats. In a column for The Washington Post, Hillary Clinton’s longtime lackey John Podesta wrote that “Scott Pruitt Needs To Go.”

“Pruitt was forced to release documents indicating that he spent more than $105,000 on first-class flights in his first year at the EPA alone,” Podesta writes. “The Post recently reported that one week’s worth of travel in June 2017 by Pruitt and his staff cost about $120,000, which the EPA inspector general is investigating.”

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway explained in a column yesterday, the media-invented scandal surrounding Pruitt’s travel expenses is largely manufactured garbage. You can read that in full here.

In a series of tweets, Strassel also explained that the travel costs of Pruitt and his staff are not unprecedented and that previous EPA heads actually spent more.

She also reiterated the statement from EPA ethics official Kevin Minoli dated March 30, which said Pruitt didn’t violate any laws or ethics rules when he stayed at a condo owned by environmental lobbyists.

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It Would Still Be Foolish for Trump to Talk to Mueller By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

According to the Washington Post, Robert Mueller says President Trump is not “a criminal target at this point.” The Post’s anonymous sources claim that the special counsel has conveyed that assurance to the president’s private attorneys.

That is good news for Trump. After all, between Mueller’s Gang of 17 alpha-prosecutors and the sundry scores of Justice Department lawyers and federal agents who were at this long before Mueller was appointed, the Russia investigation has been going on for nearly two years. By now, you would think that the focus of that effort would have become the formal “target” if there were any there there.

The president shouldn’t get too giddy, though. It’s nice not to be designated a target, but then there are those three little words, at this point.

Mueller is still investigating.

Let us revisit the “What’s My Client’s Status?” lesson in Investigations 101, the course we took during the Clinton-emails caper — in which no one’s status mattered much since, unlike in Mueller’s probe, no one was ever going to be charged.

In every investigation, a prosecutor drops relevant people in one of three buckets: target, subject, and witness. The two extremes are the easy ones to grasp. A “target” is virtually certain to be charged with a crime. A “witness” has relevant knowledge but is not suspected of any wrongdoing — think of the victim in a robbery. A defense lawyer always hopes the prosecutor will think of his client as a mere witness. While “target” is clearly the worst-case scenario, at least your choices are clear: Either cut a plea deal or fight the case at trial — no target is going to talk his way out of being charged.

“Subject” is the fuzzy category. A “subject” is someone whose behavior is being evaluated by the prosecutor and the grand jury. Usually, there is not enough evidence to charge . . . yet. As long as the investigation continues, a subject can become a target, and then a defendant, at any moment.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

‘We can’t just trust’: The thinking behind Trump’s get-tough approach to China : Steve Holland, David Lawder, Jeff Mason

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

When Liu He, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser, came to Washington in late February, he was expected to make arrangements for restarting trade talks that President Donald Trump had put on ice.

But just as Liu arrived, the Trump administration announced global steel and aluminum tariffs aimed at punishing China for what Washington says is its overproduction of steel that hurts U.S. steel makers. The announcement came a day ahead of a meeting planned with Trump’s economic point men, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and then White House adviser Gary Cohn.

Pessimistic Trump officials had said the Liu meeting would probably go nowhere. “People expect that whatever the Chinese offer it will be insufficient,” a White House official told Reuters just hours ahead of the meeting.

The timing of the announcement, whether deliberately aimed at embarrassing Liu or not, was emblematic of the Trump administration’s more confrontational approach to what the United States has long viewed as China’s unfair trade practices.

It was the opening salvo in a pattern of escalation that continued this week as Trump slapped first $50 billion in tariffs on China and then said he would seek $100 billion more after Beijing struck back.

The rapid tit-for-tat escalation, which has brought the world’s two biggest economies to the edge of a trade war, is being driven by anti-China economist Peter Navarro and U.S trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer, who cut his teeth in trade deals with Japan in the 1980s.

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Colleges’ Central Mission Erodes — and Free Speech With It Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

Only apologists determined to avert their eyes and cover their ears could deny with a straight face that higher education in America today nurses hostility to free speech.

Sporadic eruptions of that hostility have made the headlines. Last year, in early February, violent protests swept across the University of California, Berkeley against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, causing the university to cancel his speech. In March, Middlebury College students disrupted a talk by the distinguished American Enterprise Institute social scientist Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital. In April, fear of more violence compelled UC-Berkeley to rescind an invitation to the acerbic conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Last fall semester, student efforts to shut down speech on campus skyrocketed.

Less overt forms of hostility to free speech on campus run deeper. Colleges and universities teach students that free speech is merely one among many values. Campus authorities encourage students to expect that schools will silence, or at least cordon off, offensive opinions. In the humanities and social sciences, professors routinely exclude from class discussion, syllabi, and departmental offerings ideas for which a good case can be made but with which they disagree.

Some want to believe that controversies over campus free speech are a tempest in a teapot. While acknowledging that walling off students from disfavored opinions for four or five years may instill bad intellectual habits, the optimists suppose that once these graduates take their place in the real world they’ll quickly discover that the Constitution provides broad protection for speech, including the expression of, say, conservative convictions that university majorities often deem appalling and degrading. The hope is that hostility to free speech nursed on campus stays on campuses.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Trump and the US need Scott Pruitt to stay at EPA By Steve Milloy

Posted By on April 8th, 2018

“I do,” President Trump said Thursday afternoon when asked by reporters whether he still has confidence in embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt. And well the president should.

Pruitt has been the most effective appointee in implementing the Trump agenda. If Pruitt is forced out of his job because of charges he behaved unethically, America will suffer.

President Trump was elected as the economy was being choked and jobs were being destroyed by record-breaking, excessive and counterproductive regulations issued by the Obama administration.

The regulatory agency leading the charge against a healthy American economy and American job creation was the EPA. Candidate Trump knew this and campaigned on it. Millions of Americans voted for Trump precisely because he came out strongly against regulatory overreach.

When elected, the new president wisely tapped then-Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt to bring EPA back with the bounds of the law and to end the EPA’s gross overregulation.

Pruitt knew well EPA’s proclivity toward rogue behavior. He had been involved in some dozen lawsuits against the agency.

EPA Administrator Pruitt was specifically directed via presidential executive order to roll back the two most excessive overreaches of the Obama EPA – the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

The Obama war on coal and coal miners, capped off by the Clean Power Plan, has destroyed 94 percent of the market value of the U.S. coal industry and killed thousands of coal miner jobs – all for no environmental or public health gain.

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The Dark Side of the Enlightenment Today’s advocates oversell the benefits of unfettered reason. They dismiss the contributions of tradition, religion and nationalism to human progress. By Yoram Hazony

Posted By on April 7th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dark-side-of-the-enlightenment-1523050206

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under attack and calling on readers to “rise up” and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers “with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave.” And now there’s Steven Pinker’s impressive new book, “Enlightenment Now,” which may be the definitive statement of the neo-Enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond.

Do we all crave enlightenment? I don’t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn’t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm.

Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that “the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead “think things through from the ground up.”

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.”

Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale.

These statesmen and philosophers articulated the principles of modern Anglo-American constitutionalism centuries before the U.S. was created. Yet they were not Enlightenment men. They were religious, English nationalists and political conservatives. They were familiar with the claim that unfettered reason should remake society, but they rejected it in favor of developing a traditional constitution that had proved itself. When Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison initiated a national government for the U.S., they primarily turned to this conservative tradition, adapting it to local conditions.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: Soon with No Jews? by Guy Millière

Posted By on April 7th, 2018

Today, France is the only country in the Western world where Jews are murdered simply for being Jews.

Jews may be the main victims, but they are not the only ones. In just five years, 250 people in France have been murdered by Islamic terrorists.

The main problem is the spread of hatred against Jews, France and the Western world. Many Muslim extremists incite murder; and more and more often, murders occur.

A year ago, in Paris, on April 4, 2017, Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jew, was horribly tortured and murdered in her home in Paris, then thrown from her window by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) . She had reported to the police several times that she was the victim of anti-Semitic threats — in vain.

Less than a year later in Paris, another elderly — and disabled — Jew, Mireille Knoll, was raped, tortured and murdered in her apartment by another Muslim extremist. Mrs. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, had also contacted the police to say that she had been threatened. Again, the police did nothing.

For months, the French justice system tried to cover-up the anti-Semitic nature of Sarah Halimi’s murder; the judge in charge of Mireille Knoll’s case at least recognized the anti-Semitic nature of her murder at once.

Both women were victims of an anti-Semitic hatred that is rising quickly in France.

French Jews live in constant insecurity. The men who murder them evidently do not hesitate to break into homes and attack elderly women; they seem to know they can threaten their future victims without fear of arrest. More often than not, the police do not even record the complaints of Jews who go to the police station, but simply note in the daybook that a Jew claiming threats came and went.