The Fake Climate Consensus By John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/08/09/the-fake-climate-consensus-n1717386

We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”

“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”

She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.

Media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.

“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”

“So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.

“Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”

But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.

“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”

Scared Jurors, Intimidation: Reporter Andy Ngo’s Case Against Antifa Shows How Desperately Lost Portland Is By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/08/09/scared-jurors-intimidation-reporter-andy-ngos-case-against-antifa-shows-how-desperately-lost-portland-is-n1717494

Journalist Andy Ngo was chased, beaten, and chased again when he burst into a downtown Portland, Ore., hotel in May 2021 to get away from his black-bloc-clad Antifa attackers. “They’re trying to kill me,” he told the understandably frightened hotel workers. It wasn’t the first time he’d been attacked by the notorious Portland terrorist gang. If Portland’s criminal justice system wouldn’t stop these guys, Ngo figured, he’d sue them for $1 million.

On Tuesday, a Portland jury decided that two key alleged Antifa conspirators whose cases went to trial were not civilly liable for Ngo’s injuries, both physical and otherwise. The trial was marred by intimidation tactics — not just from the attackers but from their attorney who declared to the unidentified jury members, “I am Antifa” and “I will remember each one of your faces.” We’re talking Godfather stuff here.

Before you dismiss this as “Hey, you signed up for this, Portland, you voted in these knuckleheads who gave Antifa a wide berth,” let’s consider what this case means.

I sat in a Multnomah County courtroom in the trial of another journalist who was beaten by Antifa members and who pulled a pistol to fend off a second attack in 2016. Not a shot was fired, the second attack was thwarted, and instead of prosecuting his attackers, woke politicians went after Mike Strickland for showing his gun. He went to jail. His attackers were never pursued. In fact, they were never identified in court or by any of the undercover cops that had infiltrated the protest crowd that day.

The cops didn’t bother to help Strickland, either. While in the courtroom at his trial, I was threatened by Antifa allies. I also later received death threats that the Portland Police dismissed as no big deal.

Liz Peek: Here’s how Biden, Trump exit the 2024 race

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-biden-trump-exit-2024-race

What a mess. 

The United States of America, the greatest country in the world, looks set to field one candidate for president in 2024 who faces possible impeachment and is trying to put his opponent in jail and another who has now been indicted by three different prosecutors and who continues to deny the results of the last election.

No matter your politics, this is not a healthy state of affairs. People on both sides of the aisle will be mostly voting out of anger and hatred in 2024 and not because they admire their candidate. Polling shows the public has a historically low opinion of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. 

Democrats are consumed – yes, nearly deranged – by hatred of Donald Trump, even though our country prospered under his leadership. Republicans are equally furious that the former president has been falsely accused on bogus charges for years, and now faces what many consider politically-driven prosecutions.  

Is there a way out of this predicament? Perhaps.

When playing golf, players occasionally enjoy a “good-good” moment. Both have arrived on the green, perhaps four feet from the hole. Neither is in contention to win the contest, both are tired and instead of requiring each other to make the remaining putt, they declare “good-good.” They give each other that last putt and walk off the green happy. 

For the good of the country, that’s what we need from Joe Biden and Donald Trump: a “good-good” moment. What would that look like?

Anthony Fauci Defended NIH Culture Of Secrecy – The $325M Third-Party Royalty Complex. Now We Know More Details. Adam Andrzejewsk

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/anthony-fauci-defended-nih-culture?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Big-Pharma, Chinese and Russian companies, and nefarious characters from around the world all benefited by licensing tech developed at the National Institutes of Health and paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Newly released NIH documents show conclusively that statements made during congressional hearings to U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) by then-NIH leaders Anthony Fauci and Lawrence Tabak were misleading, if not outright false, regarding third-party royalties paid before, during, and after the pandemic.

Tabak, then-acting director of the National Institutes of Health, and Fauci, then-director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, both claimed before Congress that they could not release the names of the companies paying NIH third party royalties.

Last week, however, our OpenTheBooks lawsuit based on our Freedom of Information Act request caused NIH to release new documents.

The newly released documents reveal – for the first time – the names of companies that paid NIH scientists $325 million in third party royalties from 56,000 transactions between September 2009 and October 2020.

Our OpenTheBooks oversight reporting — which led to three congressional hearings during 2022 regarding NIH’s secret third party royalty payments — is available here for review.

Here are some key findings from the new disclosures:

In U.S. Senate hearings during 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to disclose the companies who licensed his “inventions” and paid his third-party royalties. Finally, now, we know the companies paying him. They are listed below.

Chinese government-owned pharmaceutical companies, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), paid the National Institutes of Health (NIH) third-party royalties to license technologies developed on the U.S. taxpayer dime. One such company neighbors the Wuhan Institute of Virology, collaborates with the lab, and even paid a royalty to Douglas Lowy, a multiple term acting director at the National Cancer Institute, a sub-institute of NIH.

Russian animal vaccine maker – which was allegedly a front for a Soviet bio-weapons lab – licensed inventions and paid royalties to NIH for tech developed with taxpayer dollars.

Purdue Pharma – the makers of the highly addictive and frequently abused OxyContin (oxycodone) – licensed tech developed with public funds and paid royalties to NIH – even after the company pleaded guilty to federal crimes relating to opioids.

Long-serving former NIH director, Francis Collins, received third party royalties on his inventions from four companies that themselves received nearly $50 million in federal contracts and grants since 2008.

During the pandemic, the American people started to worry that Big Government was too close to Big Pharma. Now, because of our oversight investigation at OpenTheBooks.com, we know just how close they are: NIH spends billions on the industry and now we know the industry sends millions back to NIH and its scientists.

Why is US sending 3,000 Navy, Marines force to Persian Gulf? The Pentagon has not yet specified the Marines’ role in deterring Iran from interfering with commercial shipping and threatening neighboring Arab states. Jared Szuba

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/08/why-us-sending-3000-navy-marines-force-persian-gulf

A contingent of more than 3,000 US Navy personnel and Marines sailed into the Suez Canal on Sunday as the Biden administration weighs options to deter Iran from seizing commercial tanker ships in the Persian Gulf region.

The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with sailors and Marines of an Amphibious Ready Group led by the USS Bataan and accompanied by the dock landing ship USS Carter Hall, will provide “greater flexibility and maritime capability” to the United States’ Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, the Navy announced today.

What that means: The Pentagon has remained mum on specifically how it intends to employ the Marines, but their arrival is part of a wider buildup of US forces in the region which defense officials described as a response to Iran’s renewed attempts to seize commercial tankers.

The deployment brings additional aircraft, helicopters and amphibious landing craft to join a dozen US F-35s, as well as F-16 and A-10 aircraft and Navy guided-missile destroyers that have already arrived in the region in recent weeks and months to ramp up joint patrols in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has escalated its attempts to seize commercial ships in Gulf waterways in recent months following the US Justice Department’s confiscation of a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker, the Suez Rajan, carrying Iranian fuel to China in April. An Iranian navy vessel opened fire on a Chevron-chartered tanker in international waters off the coast of Oman last month after the civilian ship refused orders to stop.

Iran’s navy and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have harassed or seized control of at least 20 commercial shipping tankers in the region over the past two years, according to the US 5th Fleet’s numbers.

Iran’s moves have further driven a wedge into the United States’ strategic ties with Gulf states, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates look to reduce their dependency on Washington for defense.

“It’s drawn Gulf states closer to Iran,” one American official told Al-Monitor last week. “It sends a signal to regional partners that in the absence of US forces, the US is not serious about security.”

Al-Monitor reported last week that senior Defense Department officials have been putting the finishing touches on proposals for wider legal authorities in coordination with the White House to enable the military to intervene more directly to prevent Iran’s seizures of commercial tankers.

Welcome To Biden’s Grand Illusion Of Prosperity

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/10/welcome-to-bidens-grand-illusion-of-prosperity/

‘You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you an illusion of prosperity, too.”

That was then-Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen back in 1988 arguing that the Reagan boom was a myth because it was bought and paid for with deficit spending, then running about $200 billion a year. 

What would Bentsen say today about an economy that – instead of blasting ahead at more than 4% a year at it was in 1988 – is barely eking out gains and appears headed to a downturn … despite the fact that President Joe Biden is writing $200 billion in hot checks every two months. 

We know what Biden and his legions of sycophants in the “independent” media would say. The economy is doing great thanks to “Bidenomics.”

“The economy is growing and we’re lowering costs for families. That’s Bidenomics at work,” Biden said after the latest GDP numbers came out, which showed the economy growing 2.4% in the second quarter of this year. “This progress wasn’t inevitable or accidental — it is Bidenomics in action, growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”

One week later, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+.

The lower rating, Fitch said, “reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’-rated peers.”

Fiscal deterioration over the next three years and a high and growing debt burden? Is this “Bidenomics in action”?

Look at the numbers and you see why Fitch is worried.

Dems’ ‘Science Denier’ Accusation Is Old, Wrong, and Pathetic By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/08/08/dems-science-denier-accusation-is-old-wrong-and-pathetic-n1717244

The Democrats have long fancied themselves to be the party of science. They also fancy themselves the party of youth and diversity but are currently championing an 80-year-old white guy for a second term as president of the United States.

What Democrats are known for, to those of us who don’t lap up their propaganda, is a chronic lack of self-awareness, about both themselves as people and their ideology. Pretty much everything that they believe to be true about Republicans and Democrats bears no resemblance to reality. They repeat the lies about themselves until those lies not only become true for them, but also become part of the Democratic origin story.

One of the most enduring myths that Democrats believe — especially here in the 21st century — is that they’re all elite intellectuals, while all Republicans and conservatives are knuckle-dragging rubes. Even when Republicans like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, or Ron DeSantis present the kind of higher education bona fides that usually send them into a mindless orgiastic frenzy around one another, they find reasons to be dismissive. Mustn’t allow for the possibility of intellectuals from outside the unquestioning hive mind, after all.

Of all the lies that the Democrats tell themselves, the “party of science” nonsense ranks second only to “the government always knows best.”

We’ll get to how wrong they were about all things COVID in a moment. Even before that, Democrats had essentially abandoned biology which, I just checked, is still a science. According to them, human embryos aren’t really human, there are 42,000,000 genders, and now men can get pregnant. That’s not merely denying science, that’s rejecting it altogether.

House Committee Focuses on Chinese Efforts to Steal Agriculture IP By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/08/house-committee-focuses-on-chinese-efforts-to-steal-agriculture-ip/

The House Select Committee on China is turning its focus on efforts by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to steal intellectual property from the American agriculture industry.

According to Fox News, the ranking members of both parties – Chairman Mike Gallagher (D-Wisc.) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) – traveled to Dysart, Iowa to speak with farmers about the systematic theft of agricultural technology by the CCP, and how these plans are undermining the sovereignty of American agriculture.

“Our country is filled with invisible factories and invisible farms — those that would have been built or planted here if we’d chosen to protect American technology and resources,” said Gallagher in a statement. “Both the Trump and Biden administrations have oriented U.S. strategy around ‘competing’ with the Chinese Communist Party. But we’re not “competing” if we’re letting the CCP steal hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans–we’re throwing the game from the outset.”

One example of agricultural technology that has been sought by the Chinese is seed engineering. In 2011, a field manager in Iowa discovered and exposed a Chinese seed smuggling ring. In 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted and convicted a Chinese scientist for conspiring to steal rice seeds from a biopharmaceutical research facility in Kansas; the scientist was sentenced to 10 years and one month in prison.

In 2022, Chinese national Xiang Haitao pled guilty to conspiracy to commit economic espionage; he was sentenced to two years in prison. The technology he sought to steal was a central algorithm for a software platform that aimed to help farmers visualize and analyze field data.

In his own statement, Krishnamoorthi said that the threat must be taken “very seriously,” and that the U.S. must “show the CCP some consequences for these actions.”

The rise in attempted agricultural espionage coincides with another alarming tactic being employed by the CCP, in which Chinese-linked companies and other entities have been purchasing many acres of American farmland, often located near military bases and other strategic points of interest.

The climate witch trials Questioning the climate-change narrative is now the ultimate form of heresy. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/22/the-climate-witch-trials/

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto. You can buy it on Amazon now.

In 1590, in Scotland, an elderly woman named Agnes Sampson was arrested. She was from East Lothian. Earlier in her life she had been a midwife and a healer, but lately she had been living in poverty. She was tried, found guilty and taken to Edinburgh Castle where, on 28 January 1591, she was strangled to death by rope and then burnt at the stake. Her offence? Climate change.

Sampson was charged with stirring up ‘contrary winds’, among other things. Her persecution stemmed from the troubles of King James VI whose attempts to bring his new wife, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland were continually thwarted by hellish weather. ‘Unusual’ winds capsized ships of the royal fleets. Twice did Anne’s ship have to dock in Norway due to the ‘fierce storms’. James, inspired by reports from Denmark of witches being burnt for their supposed part in the frustration of Anne’s journey, became convinced of a witches’ plot in Scotland, too. He pushed the idea of ‘weather magic’, where witches use their demonic power to cause ‘unusual’ storms, hails and fogs to descend on Earth.

The end result was the North Berwick Witch Trials, one of the deadliest episodes of witch-hunting in the history of Great Britain. Taking place a hundred years before the better-known witch-hunts of Salem in Massachusetts, the hysteria in North Berwick involved 150 accusations, copious amounts of torture to extract confessions and 25 deaths. Mrs Sampson’s was just one of those deaths. She and many others had been accused not only of the usual witchy things – mysterious healings, issuing curses and so on – but of something else, too. That they had changed the climate. That they had whipped up destructive weather. That they had deployed their malevolence to the end of ‘conjur[ing]’ terrible storms ‘in cahoots with the devil’. For in the words of Danish admiral Peter Munch, who had been tasked with transporting Anne to Scotland, what his ships had encountered was no normal climatic event – no, ‘there must be more in [this] matter than the common perversity of winds and weather’.

The women of North Berwick can be seen as among the earliest victims of climate-change hysteria, of that urge to pin the blame for anomalous weather on wicked human beings. And they weren’t alone. In Europe between the 1500s and 1700s, climate change was often the charge made against witches.

The smear campaign against JK Rowling Now a museum in Seattle has joined in the witch hunt against the Harry Potter author. James Dreyfus

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/08/the-smear-campaign-against-jk-rowling/

Here we go again. Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history. This time it’s the turn of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington, which has removed the world-famous author’s name from its Harry Potter exhibition. Last week, the museum announced that while it will continue to display memorabilia from the Harry Potter books and films, it wants no association with their supposedly problematic creator.

Explaining the decision in a 1,400-word blog, the museum’s exhibitions project manager, Chris Moore, brands Rowling a ‘cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity’. Moore, who identifies as trans and uses ‘he / them’ pronouns, takes exception to Rowling’s ongoing interest in preserving women’s hard-won rights over the ‘right of anyone who insists they are who they say they are’. Once again, Rowling’s reasonable and rational defence of women’s sex-based rights is being presented disingenuously as ‘hateful’ or ‘harmful’ towards transgender people, and therefore deserving of cancellation.

Moore even seems to think it would be better if Rowling had never existed. ‘We would love to go with the internet’s theory that these books were actually written without an author’, he writes, ‘but this certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored’.

Strikingly, Moore goes a few steps further than most of Rowling’s critics. He doesn’t just accuse her of transphobia. He also accuses the Harry Potter books of peddling ‘racial stereotypes’, promoting ‘fat shaming’ and, perhaps most heinous of all, lacking ‘LGBTQIA+ representation’. Surely to goodness there must have been a few pansexual / nonbinary students in the imaginary, magical school of Hogwarts? Shame on JKR for not giving them a voice, eh? The headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, might have been gay, but apparently that’s not enough in our world of 764 genders.

I find myself torn about this particular non-event, to be perfectly honest. On the one hand, I realise this is simply the latest in a long line of attempts to shut Rowling up. ‘I saw Goody Rowling, in the barn, consorting with the devil!’ is the tone of every such outburst. By now, these tricks have become cheap and obvious to anyone observing closely. The smears are always baseless.

On the other hand, the attempts to erase Rowling are deadly serious. Each attempted takedown inevitably leads to her receiving the vilest, cruellest abuse. Abuse which, if you’ve ever taken the time to read it, contains some of the most horrific things one human could say to or about another. Rowling is no doubt a tower of strength and resilience, having been on the receiving end of this bile for years. But it’s probably still having an effect on her, deep down.

Perhaps there is an upside to this stunt by Moore and the MoPOP, however. Removing Rowling’s name from the museum, and condemning her as ‘super hateful’, is so infantile that most right-thinking people will likely see it for the foolishness it really is. Sunlight, on occasions such as these, has a remarkable effect of highlighting the absurd and often cruel behaviour of the gender ideologues. People are getting wise to these smear tactics now that they are so regularly churned out. The problem is it is difficult to get people to speak out against them.