ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Politicizing science threatens science By Robert Arvay

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

In the old Soviet Union, science was subverted to promote failed socialist policies. The results were disastrous to both Russian society and to Russian science itself. Everything scientists did was for the advancement of the state, meaning the dictators. Individual scientists were imprisoned under torturous conditions, even murdered, if their science did not comport with official propaganda. Of course, in the end, the USSR collapsed.

Incredibly, the same failed trend toward politicizing science has resurfaced right here in the United States. A trio of articles in Scientific American reveal the danger, not as a warning, but in two cases, as actual advocacy.

In a commentary titled, “Universities Should Encourage Scientists to Speak Out about Public Issues,” the authors say this:

“Opioids. Fracking. Zika. GMOs. Scientists should be speaking up about all sorts of science-based issues that affect our lives. Especially now, when Trump administration officials tell us that climate change is debatable and that killing African elephants can benefit the herd, scientists should be constantly exposing misinformation, bogus alternative facts and fake science.”

While it is true that scientists should express their views, it must be true for all sides of a controversial issue, not only for the radical left, which dominates the universities where scientists are taught. It must also be the case that the science aspect of the issue be separated from the personal opinion aspect. Conflating the two is not only increasingly the practice, it is being encouraged by the left.

A second commentary concerned the decision by a noted science personality to attend President Trump’s first State of the Union Address. Bill Nye, the star of the PBS television series, “The Science Guy,” was invited to attend the event with Representative Bridenstine (R-OK), who is the nominee for NASA administrator. The commentary states that, “We anticipated this [attendance] would be a controversial decision, and we were right.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Remembering Who Our Friends Are By Sarah N. Stern

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

In what has ironically been designated “Operation Olive Branch,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been trying to put the northwestern Syrian region of Afrin into a stranglehold. Turkey is now in its second week of bombardment over Afrin from the air and heavy tanks are now carrying out a ground offensive into the Kurdish region.

Erdogan is a brute and a thug, who has made a habit of trampling on the human rights of his own people. He used the failed military coup of July, 2016 to arbitrarily arrest and imprison anyone whom he considers to be his opposition, including dissidents, parliamentarians, journalists, and academicians. Many have been languishing in prison since the failed military coup, without right of habeas corpus, and in 2017, Erdogan further strengthened his ironclad grip on the country of Turkey by winning a referendum, so there is no longer a free and independent judiciary or a free and independent legislative branch. A former member of the opposition party in the Turkish Parliament recently told me, “Every Saturday night, my friends and colleagues gather to read the newspaper to see if they are on the list of people to be purged in the coming week.”

The late Soviet dissident, Andre Sakharov, once said, “One can always tell a nation’s foreign policy by the way they treat their internal dissident population.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

You Might Be Part of LGBTQQIAAACPPF2K Without Even Knowing It By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

February is officially LGBT history month in Britain, and according to the acronym posted by one British gay site, you might be part of the movement — without even knowing it! Everyone from gays and lesbians to those into kinky sex now count in the movement.

How big can a tent get before it becomes meaningless? Perhaps we’re about to find out.

Here is the list published by “The Gay UK” (PJ Media comments in italics):

L – lesbian Okay.

G – gay I’m tracking.

B – bisexual Yeah, yeah.

T – transgender Identifying with the gender opposite your biological sex. That can get weird with extraterrestrials and dragons…

Q – queer Not normal, in some vague sexual way.

Q – questioning Do philosophers count? Socrates?

I – intersex At least everyone agrees this is a physical condition.

A – asexual Wait, I thought this was all about sex… Now there’s a group who identify as not wanting sex.

A – agender Ummm, people can’t erase gender, but okay I guess.

A – ally Seriously? All you have to do to get on this list is say you’re “allying” with people?

C – curious This is different from questioning how?

P – pansexual How is this different from bisexual? “I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!”

P – polysexual According to the dictionary, it’s the same as pansexual. Perhaps they meant polyamorous, loving more than one person?

F – friends and family WHAT? So if you’re vaguely related to somebody in the LGBT+ you’re in it, now?

2 – two-spirit Native Americans who embrace the masculine and the feminine in themselves. Somehow different from being high on peyote.

K – kink Yes, this means anyone who gets sexually aroused by weird things, like Fifty Shades of Grey, is in… CONTINUE AT SITE

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Mattis Reviewing Whether to Ban ‘Wide Array’ of Devices Like Smart Phones By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Department, per direction of Secretary James Mattis, is reviewing whether to ban cell phones or other electronic devices from the Pentagon and other U.S. military installations after reports that apps were revealing sensitive locations of U.S. service members.

Data from users of fitness trackers such as Fitbit was published in a global heat map by Strava, on which fellow runners can share routes. This also ended up highlighting locations of covert military installations and intelligence outposts, as the only runners using the fitness apps in many remote locations are foreigners.

The November 2017 map highlighted routes accumulated from more than 3 trillion individual GPS data points, according to the Guardian report. As U.S. personnel turn on their fitness apps for daily runs, this has ended up clearly identifying mappable outposts from Syria to Djibouti to Afghanistan.

Today at the Pentagon, spokeswoman Dana White confirmed that a review is underway to determine whether smart phones will be allowed in the building.

“It’s important to know that the secretary’s primary focus is the protection of civilians, of service members and their families,” she said. “So the Strava heat maps provided an opportunity for us to see a possible vulnerability. So he’s thinking about the totality of the DoD enterprise, so not just this building. We always are thinking about how do we enhance and adapt our security procedures. And that’s what’s happening now.”

On concerns that Pentagon staffers wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with families without a mobile phone, White clarified “it’s not just about cell phones.”

“This is a comprehensive look at technology. Technology’s very dynamic. It is important that we always adapt our security procedures,” she said.

“With respect to the workforce, the secretary’s primary interest is to ensure that we are all safe and we are all secure. Operational security is his priority. This recent incident, and others, has allowed him to take a bigger look at, what are we doing and how are we doing it?”

White said that “all of those things will be considered in his calculus, but you have to understand that the secretary sees everything within that prism of, how do I protect the civilians, the service members, their families? And so that’s how he will make his decision.”

The review is also “not just about the Pentagon,” but will take into account electronics rules “across the DoD enterprise.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

TIME FOR GREENBLATT TO WALK AWAY :CAROLINE GLICK

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

Unless Trump intends to humiliate himself and America and sell Israel down the river like his predecessors did, the peace process will not be resuscitated.

On Tuesday in Bethlehem, the Palestinians demonstrated the choice the Americans now face in their dealings with Fatah – the supposedly moderate PLO faction that controls the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. President Donald Trump and his advisers can play by Fatah’s rules or they can walk away.

On Tuesday a delegation of diplomats from the US Consulate in Jerusalem came to Bethlehem to participate in a meeting of the local chamber of commerce. When they arrived in the city, Fatah members attacked them. Their vehicles with diplomatic license plates were pelted with tomatoes and eggs by a mob of protesters calling out anti-American slogans.

After the Americans entered the hall where the meeting was scheduled to take place, some of the rioters barged in. They held placards condemning America and they shouted, “Americans Out!”

Some of the demonstrators cursed the Palestinians present, accusing them of treason for participating in a meeting with Americans. According to the news reports, the scene became tense and violent. The American officials beat a speedy retreat. As they departed the city, the Fatah rioters continued attacking their cars, kicking them and throwing eggs at them, until they were gone.

The attack on Tuesday was a natural progression.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Effect: Islamic Republic Ceases Naval Provocations in Arabian Gulf “Baffling” change of Iranian attitude is really not that mysterious. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

The State of the Union address issued by Donald Trump represented a refreshing break from the eight years of pusillanimous foreign policies pursued by past administration. Nowhere was this more evident than in the manner in which Trump described Iran’s repressive regime and attempts by the Iranian people to overthrow it through peaceful protest.

When it comes to Iran’s governing authorities, the Trump administration is under no illusions about the nefarious nature of this fascist theocracy. “We are restoring clarity about our adversaries,” Trump stated in a not too subtle jibe at his predecessor who seemed to be in a perpetual state of confusion about who his friends and enemies were. Trump also referenced the recent widespread Iranian protests, crushed with extreme ruthlessness by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij auxiliary militia. “When the people of Iran rose up against the crimes of a corrupt dictatorship,” he stated, “I did not stay silent. America stands with the people of Iran in their courageous struggle for freedom.”

By contrast, Barack Obama and his obsequious acolytes were besotted by the prospect of forging détente with the despotic mullahs of the Islamic Republic. His administration remained largely silent when Iranians took to the streets in 2009 to protest a rigged election. Some have speculated that his administration missed out on a prime opportunity for regime change. It was only downhill from there.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’ Fact-Check Fail The NYT’s “fact-checking” article on Trump’s SOTU address deserves special ridicule. February 2, 2018 Matthew Vadum

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

Conservatives already knew reporters at the New York Times were a joke, but their fact-checking article on President Trump’s first State of the Union address deserves to be held up to special ridicule.

The spectacle of a State of the Union address – especially a wildly successful one that seems to be boosting the standing of the one who delivered it – gave the Times the opportunity to conveniently deny Trump credit for his accomplishments all in one place, instead of spreading the niggardly naysaying out over days of articles.

Whether Trump, or any sitting president for that matter, deserves credit for an event happening in the country on his watch is one thing – maybe the practice is valid in some areas but not others – but the tradition in this country has been to give the president credit for good things that happen during his term in office (and conversely, to blame him when things go wrong on his watch). The buck, as President Truman said, stops there.

The leftist worldview is especially susceptible to president-as-heroic-figure thinking, giving its exaltation of the power of government, and journalists are overwhelmingly left-wingers, which makes understanding the newspaper’s unintentionally comical “2018 State of the Union fact-check” feature easier.

The piece borders on self-parody as reporters sweep Trump’s statements into the unofficial, “True, but it’s Trump, so we’ll still find a way to trash him,” category.

First off, let’s look at reporters Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt who won’t give Trump his full due as Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Really Created the Trump Dossier? Was it really a British intel agent or a Clinton political operative? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

In the very early nineties, the Democrats were as obsessed with cocaine as they are now are with Russia. The cocaine in question was alleged to have been bought by Vice President Dan Quayle. The 1992 election was coming up. The decades of corruption, slime and lies by the Clintons were about to pay off.

But that’s not how it looked then.

President George H.W. Bush was enjoying high approval ratings. Bill Clinton would weasel and claw his way to the front of the line largely because the election seemed like a lot cause for the Democrats.

But the Clintons still had plenty of dirty tricks left to play. The Quayle cocaine story was one of them. Like most discredited Democrat smears, it was forgotten once it was no longer needed. It’s hard now to understand how so many reporters and politicians could be sucked in by a ridiculous smear campaign.

One of the Quayle accusers had confessed to lying both to prison officials and to 60 Minutes.

“This guy not only flunked the lie detector test, but he broke down and cried in front of Morley Safer and said that he had made it up because he wanted to get out of jail,” Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, recollected.

But the more the story came apart, the more new conspiracy theories were spawned to bolster it. Like Michael Wolff’s smears, it was too good for the left not to believe. Much like Russian collusion, the story quickly shifted from whether Quayle had actually bought drugs to whether the Bush administration had tried to cover it up. The shift from a specific criminal accusation to nebulous conspiracy theories that can never be disproven, but that empower open-ended witch hunts, are a hallmark of Dem smears.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Gang That Couldn’t Lie Straight Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on February 2nd, 2018

With the much anticipated FISA-abuse memo expected to drop any second, the media are attempting to refocus the narrative onto possible obstruction of justice by President Trump and his subordinates.

Thursday, the New York Times led with a lengthy report on the Mueller investigation’s curiosity about a statement crafted under the president’s direction last July. It concerned the now infamous Trump Tower meeting a year earlier — i.e., on June 9, 2016 — between top Trump-campaign officials Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort and a Russian contingent led by the Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

To cut to the chase, Mueller appears to be homing in on the question of whether there was a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

While President Trump was deeply involved in the drafting of the statement, it was ultimately issued by a lawyer in the name of Don Jr., to whom the Times had directed its questions about the Trump Tower meeting. The statement was untrue and ill-considered. Worse, it conflicted with another misleading version of the Trump Tower meeting that the president’s legal team simultaneously provided to a different media outlet, Circa. As the Times report correctly asserts, both versions sought to conceal the true purpose of the Trump Tower meeting, namely: to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton from Russian-government sources.

It is not a crime to lie to journalists. From this premise, some Trump-friendly commentators have reasoned that the false statements about the meeting given by Trump subordinates to the Times and Circa have no relevance to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry. This is wrong.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Americans First President Trump should temper his offer of amnesty by placing strong conditions on eligibility. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on February 1st, 2018

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Donald Trump showed us the president who could build an enduring majority and put the identity-mongering, America-dissing Democrats behind the eight ball for a long time to come. Let’s hope that it’s not too late.

President Trump’s admonition that “Americans are dreamers, too” was a brilliant retort to illegal-alien sentimentalism, and we have already heard frustrated cries that he unjustly “appropriated” the designation. Trump made a compelling case for an immigration system that puts the interests of Americans first. “I want our poor to have a chance to rise,” he said, something that is more difficult in competition with large flows of unskilled aliens. Trump is right to demand the closure of loopholes that have allowed unaccompanied juvenile illegal aliens to evade the law; he is right to call for the end to chain migration and the visa lottery system. Legal entry for immigration purposes should be conditional on the intending immigrants’ skills, language abilities, and education levels, not by their clan affiliations. The Democrats’ refusal to negotiate on their demand for blanket amnesty betrays their real priority, which is not providing for illegal immigrants who are already here but ensuring unlimited flows of immigration in the future. To them, yet-unborn foreigners are just dreamers waiting to happen.

President Trump is proposing a very large-scale amnesty—a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal aliens—that his base will perceive as a betrayal. He can distinguish it from previous amnesties, however, by insisting on something missing from all previous remissions: that the illegal alien and potential American have zero arrests and convictions. Heretofore, every proposed and actual amnesty gave illegal aliens two free misdemeanor convictions, but avoiding crime is hardly an insuperable demand of new citizens. President Trump said that the amnestied illegal aliens must show “good moral character”—a clean criminal record is an essential prerequisite of such a showing.