Displaying posts published in

October 2014

BETSY MCCAUGHEY, PHD -Ebola Crisis: Team Obama Takes Politically Correct Approach, Ignores Science Must read ****

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ebola-crisis-team-obama-takes-politically-correct-approach-ignores-science

On Monday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Thomas Frieden announced a new policy on health care workers returning from Ebola-plagued West Africa.

Parroting President Obama’s Saturday radio address, Frieden cautioned that Americans must be “guided by the science,” not fear.

Sorry. The Obama administration’s half-way approach is based on political correctness. It ignores the science.

According to Frieden, every day about five health care workers fly back from West Africa to the U.S., landing at airports in Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, New York’s JFK, or Dulles outside Washington, D.C.

For months, the CDC did almost nothing to prevent a returning doctor or nurse from inadvertently spreading the disease here.

On Thursday Dr. Craig Spencer, who had returned from a stint at Doctors Without Borders in Guinea on October 17, was rushed into isolation at New York city’s Bellevue Hospital with Ebola. Before his diagnosis, Spencer took subways, went bowling and dined out.

Authorities scrambled to identify his contacts. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, jointly announced on Sunday that health care workers landing at area airports after treating Ebola patients would have to undergo 21 days isolation. Governors of Florida and Illinois announced they would be devising policies as well.

By Monday, Thomas Frieden had to respond to the spectacle of governors concocting isolation policies on the run to prevent the possibility, however small, of Ebola being spread. Unfortunately, Frieden stopped short of endorsing isolation. Instead he announced that local officials would monitor doctors and nurses coming from West Africa for fever or other symptoms but not necessarily isolate them.

Frieden said isolating the brave doctors and nurses would be a “stigma” and make them “pariahs.” That’s a shockingly unscientific attitude toward quarantine from a trained epidemiologist.

PATRICK MOORE-THE CO-FOUNDER OF GREENPEACE GOES TO WAR: TONY THOMAS

The co-founder of Greenpeace left his Melbourne audience in no doubt that the so-called ‘environmental organisation’ is a not only an enemy of progress, it regards the waste of human life as collateral damage in its crusade to hector, harass and hobble all who oppose its ambitions

It was 1978. Young Greenpeace leader Patrick Moore, hair Afro-style, was interfering with the annual baby fur-seal hunt off Newfoundland. He jumped on a baby seal to shield it with his body but found it was, as he put it, ‘a tough little bugger’ who didn’t want to be jumped on. He hung on to it for dear life, his film crews’ cameras whirring, but was arrested and dragged off. Two sealers bashed the pup’s head in and skinned their little victim.

At least Greenpeace had its ‘mind bomb’ – the term Greenpeace used for irresistible media airplay. But when the film got to CBC studios in Montreal, it was exposed and useless, either by carelessness or sabotage. But the still photos made it into 3000 newspapers.

It was a bit hard to reconcile that Greenpeace warrior with the balding, conservative 67-year-old at a Melbourne podium last Friday. He quit Greenpeace in 1986 after 15 years as a co-founder, saying the organisation had become anti-science and anti-human. He now runs consultancy Ecosense Environmental as “The Sensible Environmentalist”, combating what he calls green sensationalism, misinformation, and pop-environmentalism. His Melbourne talk was sponsored by the Galileo Movement, and based on his book Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout (Beatty Street, 2013).

Moore is not exactly being rushed by ABC interviewers, unlike, say, Green catastrophist Naomi Oreskes. He suspects his one scheduled interview appointment will involve a hostile host wanting to know about his Big Oil funding. (editor’s note: Moore was set to be interviewed by Jon Faine, of the ABC’s radio 774, but the host called in sick that day.)

CHRIS CARR: NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM?

“If the West does finally collapse in the politically correct multicultural mire, it may well be said by some future historian that it died from stupidity. The big hope is that ordinary punters are waking up.”

Long before last week’s terror attacks in Canada, seventeen suspects were arrested for planning something similar. Politically correct authorities pointedly declined to connect the dots back then, and they seem almost as keen to ignore the obvious now

Whenever I hear the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron and other sundry spokesmen, from the ranks of the politically correct, posing as experts on Islam, I am torn between anger and laughter at the depth of their imbecility. Their ability to pretend not to see what is in plain sight seems limitless.

ISIS has nothing to do with Islam? Terrorists, inconveniently quoting the Koran, have nothing to do with Islam? Perhaps terrorists could just as easily be Catholic nuns, Presbyterians, bored “youths”, maybe even geriatric war veterans. That is the way of airport security in our multicultural paradise. After all, you cannot be seen to single out a certain group — you-know-who devotees of the Prophet, aka the founder of that creed which must never, ever be named.

We read that

“Authorities in Canada are trying to understand what motivated a gunman to kill the soldier with Harper calling the shooting the country’s second “terrorist” attack this week. During his remarks this morning, Harper continued to connect the two attacks, saying that they were perpetrated by “young men born and raised in this peaceful country” who turned their backs on the values that they were taught.”

Despite blindingly obvious evidence to the contrary, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour there is “no evidence at this stage” that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was linked to a wider group, or network, of jihadists.

“There’s no evidence at this stage for us to know that. Obviously there’s an investigation going on, and we hope to learn more in the … coming days. It was clear that, police authorities now have announced, that he was acting alone yesterday”.

Steering the Climate Change Coverage By Insider Staff ****Read the comments from Quadrant

https://quadrant.org.au/
All the news that’s fit to ignore

Problems always loom larger when close at hand, so there is perverse reassurance to be drawn from the fact that The Age, SMH and ABC have not been alone in surrendering their news and opinion pages to ideologues and the moral arrogance of green-left activism. On the other side of the world it seems The New York Times, which fancies itself as a journal of record, is every bit as prey to close-minded arrogance as its antipodean counterparts.

Here is the Times latest environmental editor, Adam Bryant, explaining that it will be a long time between drinks before he allows climate sceptics to make their case in any story that he oversees:

“Claims that the entire field of climate science is some kind of giant hoax do not hold water, and we have made a conscious decision that we are not going to take that point of view seriously.”

That doesn’t mean he is opposed to debates of the approved, science-is-settled variety:

“…there is a huge amount of legitimate debate and uncertainty within mainstream science. Scientists are pretty open about not being sure how bad things will get, or how quickly.”

That would seem a case of dumb arrogance, rather than blinkered bias, if not for Timesman Bryant’s cited example of what, exactly, represents respectable, solid, unimpeachable science: Australia’s very own catastropharian David Karoly!

If Bryant was on the ball as a reporter, rather than a bawler of warmist refrains in the climate-catastrophe chorus, he might have come across the odd mention of Karoly-style settled science — settled, that is, in that it his paper claiming Australia has never been hotter in the past 1000 years had to be withdrawn and has since sunk without trace, along with the $300,000 of taxpayer money that paid for it.

Bryant’s views on the way, ahem, serious journalism must report warmism and other topics can be read via the link below.

Few topics fuel as much reader attention as climate change. Adam Bryant recently became editor of The Times’s expanded team covering the environment. We asked him how he is approaching the position.

http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/10/27/steering-the-climate-change-coverage/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

When Leftist Race Hatred Meets Islamism By Arnold Ahlert

Apparently the hatchet-wielding maniac who assaulted two New York City policemen in Queens had ambitions in addition to his twisted jihadist sympathies. Attacker Zale Thompson’s father told the New York Post that killing white people was also on would-be murderer’s agenda.

“He wanted white people to pay for all that slavery and all that racism,” said father Ralph Thompson. “I think he committed suicide — and he was taking one of y’all with him.” Asked if “one of y’all” referred to whites, Thompson answered in the affirmative. “He just said, ‘They have to pay for all their unfairness,’” the father explained. “Unfairness for the way they treat black people.”

Zale Thompson assaulted three white and one light-skinned Hispanic police officers while they posed for a photograph on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. White officers Kenneth Healey, 25, and Joseph Meeker, 24, were struck by the hatchet. Meeker was cut on the arm, and rookie cop Healey was struck on the back of his skull, nearly killing him. The other two officers on the scene shot Thompson dead. Sadly, innocent bystander LaToya Jones, 29, was also shot and might be paralyzed.

Thompson’s 2013 comment on Google+ revealed the animus to which his father referred. “It’s ok for white people to draw pictures of a white jesus, and then colonize Africa, and enslave the negro in America, wipe out the native American, and invade the middle east,” he wrote. “They call black people racist for rejecting the oppression they suffered from whites. Listen, when black people have colonized the entire continent of Europe, enslaved its people, and sold them into bondage to foreign lands, then you can call them racist.”

Additional comments were uncovered by the SITE Intelligence Group, an entity that monitors extremist activity. On Facebook and YouTube, Thompson characterized Christians as “aggressive and violent” and chastised the “Christianized Negro” for adhering to the faith “his slave master gave him.” He was apparently the commenter named Zale Thompson who also offered his opinion on a YouTube video entitled, “Uprise of the Khilafah (Caliphate) World Wide”:

If you’re looking for “perfect” muslims who never make any mistakes in their Jihad, then you will be looking in vain! If the Zionists and the Crusaders had never invaded and colonized the Islamic lands after WW1, then there would be no need for Jihad! Which is better, to sit around and do nothing, or to Jihad fisabeelallah (for allah’s sake)!

Geert Wilders on “Fighting the Islamization of Free Societies” — on The Glazov Gang

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/geert-wilders-on-fighting-the-islamization-of-free-societies-on-the-glazov-gang-1-1/

This week’s special episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by Geert Wilders, the founder and leader of the “Party for Freedom” — which is currently the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament. Mr. Wilders is best known for his brave stance against, and truth-telling about, Islam. He is the author of Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me.

He came on the program to discuss: “Fighting the Islamization of Free Societies.”

Don’t miss it!

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE ISLAMIZATION OF JERUSALEM

Chaya Zissel Braun was murdered on her first trip back from the Western Wall where the indigenous Jewish population of Israel continues to pray in the shadow of the shrine established there by the Muslim conquerors from which the racist Muslim settlers rain down rocks on the Jewish worshipers.

The three-month old baby girl died when a Muslim terrorist rammed a car into a crowd hurtling her into the air and headfirst onto the pavement. Her death did not take place in isolation. It was not caused by a tiny minority of extremists. Her blood was spilled on the street for the Islamization of Jerusalem.

The Islamization of Jerusalem is an international cause. It does not just come out of Gaza City or even Ramallah. Nor Doha or Istanbul. The politicians and diplomats of every major country demand the Islamization of Jerusalem. When they talk about a Palestinian State with its capital in Jerusalem what they are really demanding is the restoration of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948.

They demand it with words and boycotts, but the Muslim settlers on whose behalf they cry for the Apartheidization of Jerusalem are writing their murderous demands with the blood of little girls.

The baby girl was murdered to Islamize a city. She died as the Israeli soldiers had died reunifying Jerusalem after the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed the Jewish population and as ordinary Jerusalemites had died at the hands of Jordanian snipers searching the city for Jewish and Christian targets. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house, and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.

Illegal Voters Tipping Election Scales? By Matthew Vadum ****

Voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens is so prevalent throughout the nation that it gave us Obamacare, according to a disturbing new study.

And if illegal voting by non-citizens, who tend to support Democratic Party candidates and who heavily supported President Obama, could tip the scales in the 2008 congressional elections, it can do so again in congressional elections next week and in the presidential contest in 2016. In 2008 one report estimated that as many as 2.7 million non-citizens were registered to vote nationwide.

The academic report, to be published in the December issue of Electoral Studies, continues the ongoing demolition of the Left’s narrative that voter fraud is a figment of paranoid Republicans’ imagination. Democrats cling religiously to their mantra that voter fraud doesn’t exist or is of little consequence because they have difficulty competing electorally without vote fraud. Fraud helps Democrats eke out victories in close races, which helps to explain their vehement opposition to commonsense electoral integrity measures like purging dead people from voter rolls or requiring photo ID for voting.

The findings of Jesse Richman and David Earnest, two political science professors at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., confirm that voter fraud is commonplace and widespread, something that honest, as opposed to engaged or left-wing, scholars have known for years.

“In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections,” the authors write.

The academics got their data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) which contains what they term a “large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) [that] provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010.” Using CCES data from 2008, they tried “to match respondents to voter files so … [they] could verify whether they actually voted.”

Although non-citizen participation “is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration,” they write. This new study “examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants,” a first in voting studies, they claim.

Berkeley’s Jihad Against Bill Maher By Robert Spencer

This whole Bill Maher controversy is as illuminating as it is entertaining. Bill Maher was a darling of the Left when he was criticizing Christianity, but now that he has turned his gimlet eye to Islamic supremacism, the foes of free speech have turned against him with venom. Maher is scheduled to give the fall commencement address at the University of California-Berkeley, but Muslim students there have begun a petition drive to get him canceled.

The Daily Californian reported Sunday that

the Change.org petition was authored by ASUC Senator Marium Navid, who is backed by the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition, or MEMSA, and Khwaja Ahmed, an active MEMSA member. The petition, which urges students to boycott the decision and asks the campus to stop him from speaking, has already gathered more than 1,400 signatures as of Sunday.

Anticipating that this petition would be outed as the fascist endeavor it is, Navid explained:

“It’s not an issue of freedom of speech, it’s a matter of campus climate. The First Amendment gives him the right to speak his mind, but it doesn’t give him the right to speak at such an elevated platform as the commencement. That’s a privilege his racist and bigoted remarks don’t give him.”

The campaign against Maher is called “Free Speech, Not Hate Speech.”

“Free Speech, Not Hate Speech”: this is the mechanism that today’s Leftist and Islamic supremacist authoritarians are using to shut down any free and open discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression. This slogan was thrown at me last May when I spoke at Cal Poly; I responded (as you can see toward the end of this video) by pointing out that “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder, and the one who is granted the power to determine what is or isn’t “hate speech” has been given extraordinary control over the public discourse, such that any opinions disliked by the ruling elite can be stigmatized and ruled out of bounds by means of this label.

Take the Hard Votes By Jonah Goldberg

Congress should have more partisanship about ideas and less about the legislative process.

‘What day is it?”

“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.

“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

As a proud member of the “don’t just do something, sit there” school of politics, I don’t fret much about partisanship and gridlock. Partisanship and gridlock aren’t bugs of our constitutional system, they’re features. And while everyone likes to see their preferred policies sail through Congress, on the whole I think we’ve been well served by those features for two centuries.

That said, in the spirit of compromise so lacking in Washington, I would like to offer a suggestion for how to fix the alleged dysfunction in Washington: Let’s have more partisanship about ideas and less about process.

You have to wonder if Harry Reid feels like an idiot yet. For years now, the Senate majority leader has been cynically protecting Democratic senators — and President Obama — from difficult votes. The rationale was pretty straightforward. He wanted to spare vulnerable Democrats named Mark — Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, Alaska’s Mark Begich and Colorado’s Mark Udall — and a few others from having to take difficult votes on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline, EPA rules, and immigration reform.

The problem for the Marks and other red- or swing-state Democrats is that, having been spared the chance to take tough votes, they now have little to no evidence they’d be willing to stand up to a president who is very unpopular in their states.

Thanks to Reid’s strategy of kicking the can down the road, GOP challengers now get to say, “My opponent voted with the president 97 percent of the time.” Democrats are left screeching “war on women!” and “Koch brothers!”