ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate-Change Censorship Campaign The left is demanding that social media shut down debate even on solutions.

Posted By on October 6th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-censorship-campaign-big-tech-social-media-environmental-groups-letter-elon-musk-twitter-11665006072?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Elon Musk said this week he’ll buy Twitter after all, and the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flamethrowers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media. He won’t have it easy. On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.”

What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear. The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately-acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.” Then they could proceed to complain that the tech giants aren’t doing enough censoring.

The letter was directed to Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. At least the public can read it. How much of this lobbying goes on behind the scenes?

“We partnered with Google,” Melissa Fleming, the communications undersecretary for the United Nations, told a panel last month. “If you Google ‘climate change,’ at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Under Bidenomics, A ‘Soft Landing’ For Economy Is No Longer Possible

Posted By on October 6th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/06/under-bidenomics-a-soft-landing-for-economy-is-no-longer-possible/

The Democratic Party’s faithful are whistling past the graveyard, hoping with all their might we’ll avoid an economic slide. As a matter of general economics, we’re already in a recession. And it looks like things will soon get worse, not better.

“We hope we can have what they say, ‘a soft landing,’ a transition to a place where we don’t lose the gains that I ran to make in the first place for middle-class folks, being able to generate good-paying jobs and — expansion,” President Joe Biden told CBS’ 60 Minutes last month.

Good luck with that, Mr. President. Even members of your own party think it’s hogwash.

As economist Larry Summers, who advised both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said last week, a soft landing is “really quite unlikely.” We agree, as do most economists of our acquaintance.

Indeed, looking at the repeated economic policy mistakes made by Biden, or whoever now is really calling the shots in the White House, and the far-left Democrat-led Congress, it’s hard not to conclude that the economy’s set for a mighty fall.

Four trends stand out:

Stock and housing market declines. The stock market’s epic plunge has destroyed an estimated $11 trillion in wealth this year alone, while home prices, after peaking in June, have fallen sharply as interest rates jump above 6%. As home equity shrinks in a weakening housing market, consumers’ ability to borrow against their homes will also shrink

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

In stunning interview with Tucker Carlson last night, Tony Bobulinski explained how the FBI fixed the 2020 election By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/in_stunning_interview_with_tucker_carlson_last_night_tony_bobulinski_explained_how_the_fbi_fixed_the_2020_election.html

Most readers already know that Tony Bobulinski was the business partner of Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, the president’s brother, as they attempted to put together deals with foreign actors.  That partnership broke up, and Bobulinski has become a whistleblower.  But his efforts to interest the FBI in multiple Biden family felonies, including against him, have come to naught.

Last night, in a second sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson, Bobulinski laid out stunning details on how the FBI deep-sixed any public revelations, much less indictments, based on what Bobulinski says are thousands of pages of proof, including emails, text messages, recorded phone calls, and actual business documents.  Despite having possession of abundant evidence, the FBI sat on the investigation through the 2020 election, thereby depriving the public of information that almost certainly would have swayed enough votes to change the outcome and re-elect Donald Trump.

One key figure is Timothy Thibault, who was made the FBI’s point man on the information brought by Bobulinski, who never followed up.  Miranda Devine of the New York Post broke this story a month ago:

Timothy Thibault, the FBI agent alleged to have interfered with an investigation into Hunter Biden, was assigned by the Washington Field Office as “point man” to manage whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, the first son’s former business partner, before the 2020 election — but he suppressed his damning revelations, sources say.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Disgraced EcoHealth Alliance Should Be Banished To Wuhan, But Fauci Just Gave It Millions More Tax Dollars By: Evita Duffy

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/05/disgraced-ecohealth-alliance-should-be-banished-to-wuhan-but-fauci-just-gave-it-millions-more-tax-dollars/

EcoHealth Alliance should have been disbanded two years ago, Peter Daszak should have been fired, and Anthony Fauci should be in exile.

EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak’s nonprofit that infamously funneled funds into the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the bat-based coronaviruses research that is suspected of starting the Covid-19 pandemic, has just been awarded another grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

And this new grant is once again slated for bat-based coronavirus research. The grant, issued on Sept. 21, is designated for “Analyzing the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam,” and was given specifically by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID), a branch of the NIH still being run by Anthony Fauci until his upcoming retirement.

The first installment of the grant is for $653,392 and is part of a five-year plan to give the nonprofit a total of $3.3 million. The grant was given the same day the NIAID granted EcoHealth “more than $2.1 million for two more ongoing studies, one of which involves so-called ‘gain-of-function’ to make viruses more dangerous,” according to the New York Post.

Under the Trump administration, EcoHealth Alliance was defunded of taxpayer dollars. Now, after miraculously avoiding massive public backlash following its 2020 defunding, it appears the organization is back in business and carrying on as normal.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election Firm CEO Arrested for Storing Data in China One Day after NYT Reporter Dismissed Allegations as ‘Conspiracy Theory’By Isaac Schorr

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/election-firm-ceo-arrested-for-storing-data-in-china-one-day-after-nyt-reporter-dismissed-allegations-as-conspiracy-theory/

A sympathetic profile of Eugene Yu and his election-logistics software firm, Konnech, was published by the New York Times on Monday. Stuart Thompson, a technology reporter specializing in “misinformation” and “disinformation,” declared that Konnech had been accused of giving the Chinese government “backdoor access” to the personal information of poll workers based on “threadbare evidence,” or even “none at all.”

A day later, Thompson reported that Yu had been arrested, as Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón put it in a statement, “as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information” of Los Angeles County poll workers.

According to Gascón, “information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China,” a breach of the county’s contract with Konnech.

“Data breaches are an ongoing threat to our digital way of life. When we entrust a company to hold our confidential data, they must be willing and able to protect our personal identifying information from theft. Otherwise, we are all victims,” said Gascón, a progressive Democrat who survived a recall effort earlier this year.

The district attorney emphasized that “the alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results,” but did note that “security in all aspects of any election is essential so that we all have full faith in the integrity of the election process.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

OPEC Gives Biden and U.S. Consumers the Middle Finger By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/opec-gives-biden-and-u-s-consumers-the-middle-finger/

The U.S. expected bad news from the OPEC+ meeting, but the decision to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day is even worse than expected.

Today’s Morning Jolt spotlights reports that the Biden administration is “panicking” — their reporter’s words, not mine! — that OPEC is about to enact a production cut that will send the price of oil soaring even further. At the beginning of the week, the fear was that OPEC+ was considering a cut of more than 1 million barrels a day.

It is time to elevate the panic level:

The OPEC+ alliance announced it will cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day, the oil cartel and its allies announced Wednesday, which may set the cost of gas rising again after a year of tumultuous prices at the pump.

In a further humiliation for the administration, this move comes after a “full-court press” from the administration against OPEC+ countries, warning them not to cut production:

Amos Hochstein, Biden’s top energy envoy, has played a leading role in the lobbying effort, which has been far more extensive than previously reported amid extreme concern in the White House over the potential cut. Hochstein, along with top national security official Brett McGurk and the administration’s special envoy to Yemen Tim Lenderking, traveled to Jeddah late last month to discuss a range of energy and security issues as a follow up to Biden’s high-profile visit to Saudi Arabia in July. . . .

The White House has asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to make the case personally to some Gulf state finance ministers, including from Kuwait and the UAE, and try to convince them that a production cut would be extremely damaging to the global economy.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

When a ‘conspiracy theory’ turns out to be…not a theory by Byron York

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-a-conspiracy-theory-turns-out-to-be-not-a-theory

On Monday, the New York Times published a story about Konnech, a small election software company that has just 27 employees, 21 based in Michigan and six in Australia. The paper reported that Konnech has been the target of “election deniers” who have made it the focus of “a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election.”

“Using threadbare evidence, or none at all,” the New York Times’s Stuart A. Thompson reported, the “election deniers” said Konnech “had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”

In the last two years, the New York Times added, “conspiracy theorists have subjected election officials and private companies that play a major role in elections to a barrage of outlandish voter fraud claims.” But now, “the attacks on Konnech demonstrate how far-right election deniers are also giving more attention to new and more secondary companies and groups.”

Konnech officials assured the New York Times that “none of the accusations were true.” Thompson reported that employees “feared for their safety” from right-wing violence and that “Konnech’s founder and chief executive, Eugene Yu, an American citizen who immigrated from China in 1986, went into hiding with his family after receiving threatening messages.”

Any reasonable reader would come away with the conclusion that Konnech, an innocent company that makes products to deal with “basic election logistics, such as scheduling poll workers,” has been the target of crazy, and possibly dangerous, conspiracy theories. To press the point, the New York Times used the phrase “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorists” nine times in the article, once in the headline — “How a Tiny Elections Company Became a Conspiracy Theory Target” — seven times in the body of the story, and once in a photo caption. Got it?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s Energy Crisis By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/10/03/joe_bidens_energy_crisis_856943.html

The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses—the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion. The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply. In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in his powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own EPA tried to strangle at birth.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

Yom Kippur : Auschwitz/Birkenau 1944

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

Here in this most wonderful corner of the Diaspora, we are free to spend Yom Kippur as we wish. For me it is a day of reflection and introspection as a new year begins. As always, I reflect on Jewish survival and the memory of those martyrs of the Holocaust for whom it was to be the last Yom Kippur.

Here are excerpts from :

Observing Yom Kippur in the Valley of Death: Auschwitz/Birkenau 1944

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/observing-yom-kippur-in-the-valley-of-death-auschwitz-birkenau-1944/

“despite the most appalling conditions in the camps, where each day brought Jewish prisoners closer to dying of starvation, and despite the exhausting back-breaking labor that the Nazi guards forced Jews to do every day and doubly hard on the High Holy Days, so many still sought to get closer to G-d by fasting on Yom Kippur. ”

“The prisoners understood and knew full well the enormous consequences for observing Yom Kippur by praying and fasting. To quote one, “even if beaten, tortured, and put to death, my eternal life would be greatly strengthened for having ‘returned’ to a pure state.” Make no mistake, like us, they prayed to be put in the book of life, that “the hand of G-d would take them to the day of liberation.” Yet, they faced the probability of imminent death with courage and the strong conviction that “even if it was their last day on earth” they could not do otherwise. ”

They are forever inscribed in the Book of Life…..rsk

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Conservative Influencers Vow to Keep Reporting on Radical Gender Surgeries on Minors After 3 Medical Groups Demand DOJ Investigations By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/04/conservative-influencers-vow-to-keep-exposing-radical-gender-surgeries-on-minors-after-3-medical-groups-demand-doj-investigations/

Three major medical associations on Monday asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate and prosecute people who are allegedly threatening, coordinating or provoking violence against children’s hospitals across the nation that provide irreversible sex change procedures on minors, including puberty blockers, chemical castration, and surgical amputations.

In addition to siccing the Justice Department on their detractors, the groups said they have also pressured social media platforms to censor “high profile users” who “share false and misleading information.”

The increasingly woke American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association (AMA) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) wrote to Garland on Monday, claiming in a letter that “physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based health care.”

Journalist Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, posted the letter onto Twitter:

“These attacks have not only made it difficult and dangerous for institutions and practices to provide this care, they have also disrupted many other services to families seeking care,” the letter states. “In one hospital, a new mother was prevented from being with her preterm infant because the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was on lockdown due to a bomb threat.”

In August, there was a bomb threat against Boston Children’s Hospital, causing it to be locked down with patients and staff inside. A bomb squad discovered that there were no explosives on the premises. Last month, the FBI arrested the alleged perpetrator, 37-year-old Catherine Leavy of Westfield, Massachusetts.