Displaying posts published in

June 2019

Gaza rocket strikes Israeli synagogue and school in Sderot

https://worldisraelnews.com/gaza-rocket-hits-israeli-school-no-injuries/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&u

A rocket from Gaza struck a yeshiva in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, a frequent target of attacks. There were no injuries. 

Palestinian terrorists fired a rocket from Gaza into southern Israel late Thursday, striking a Chabad building housing a synagogue and school but causing no injuries, Israeli authorities said.

The rockets – fired from the town of Beit Hanoun, according to Channel 13 – set the stage for a likely Israeli reprisal and raised the possibility of a new round of fighting, weeks after a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli police said the rocket struck a building in the Israeli border town of Sderot, a frequent target of rocket fire.

The ceasefire, reached in early May, has begun to unravel in recent days. Overnight on Wednesday, Israeli fighter jets struck an underground terrorist infrastructure belonging to Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack was in response to rocket fire from Gaza earlier that night, the IDF reported.

A Remedial Lesson in Climate Education by Greg Williams

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/06/a-remedial-les

I am a mathematics teacher in a well-to-do school.  Next year will be my fiftieth year in the profession.  I am well known around the school as someone who hasn’t fallen for the CO2 swindle, although I have no problem with the notion that the various climates around the earth are changing in various ways.  Being a mathematics teacher, the notion the mainstream media runs, that the earth has “a climate”, appals me.  How can we can “average” the multitude of climates around the earth and come up with “the climate”? It does not compute.

I often come across students and teachers who express concern over climate change and the need for humanity to do something about it.  I always begin such conversations with the question, “What’s the problem?”  They always, eventually, get down to the fact that it’s carbon “pollution” and how we must stop burning fossil fuels and embrace renewables in order to save the planet. Again, its the MSM spin. My next question is how much CO2 is in the atmosphere?  I have yet to come across anyone at school, when asked that question, who knows that it’s a bit above 400 ppm.  After informing them of this particular fact, I ask if they know how low the CO2 concentration can fall  before life on earth ceases.  Again, I have yet to come across anyone at school who knows that once it drops to about 180 ppm, we are in trouble.

My third question after that is this: if 400 ppm is too much and 180 ppm too little, how much CO2 is just right?  Again, no one has been able to answer this, as no one on the planet knows the answer.  I then try to present students (adults have usually stopped listening by that stage) with some perspective on 400 ppm. I ask them to think of a million molecules of atmosphere as a million one-dollar coins placed adjacent to each other in a square.  The square would be 25 metres by 25 metres, about the size of a school’s small gymnasium. The 400 ppm of CO2, if represented by those dollar coins, would make up a square 50 cm by 50 cm. What’s more, since humanity is responsible for only about three per cent of the CO2 in the atmosphere, the human contribution to those one million coins would be 12 coins.

Tory leadership vote result: Boris Johnson surges ahead in first round with 114 votes

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/06/13/tory-leadership-race-news-vote-conservative-election-brexit/

Rivals are hoping the favourite will implode

Call it the Devon Loch strategy. With Boris Johnson enjoying a seemingly unassailable lead, having won 114 votes in the first round of ballots in the leadership contest to decide our next Prime Minister, his remaining rivals have only one hope: that he will fall, in spectacular fashion, at the final hurdle.

Devon Loch was the racehorse, owned by the Queen Mother, who took a commanding lead in the 1957 Grand National, only to inexplicably tumble to the ground 40 yards from the winning post.

His Blonde Ambition tour now formally underway following –  off the back of a low-key launch designed to show he can do sensible, the former foreign secretary also appears to have a clear run.

Not only does he have twice as many declared backers among MPs as any contestant, he is wildly popular among the membership and a new poll shows that were he to be Prime Minister, the Conservatives would be on course for a thumping 140-seat majority.

So the latest strategy among his rivals is to seek to become the candidate still there in the final round, when the two contestants chosen by Conservative MPs are put forward to the membership, and then cross fingers, legs and toes that Mr Johnson will mess up.

Hong Kong protesters attack Britain’s response to extradition outcry as pressure from Beijing grows Sophia Yan,

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/13/hong-kong-protesters-attack-britains-response-erosion-rights/

Hong Kong demonstrators are calling on the UK to voice stronger opposition against the controversial extradition that triggered mass protests and rare scenes of violence.

On the day after hundreds of thousands took to the streets to block parliament from debating the proposed laws, some protesters turned their ire to the city’s former colonial rulers.

“Is Britain going to honour its promise to the Hong Kong people that our way of life will not be threatened after they handed us over to the Chinese?” Jessica Yeung, 50, a university professor on a hunger strike by the city’s main government building, told The Telegraph.

“Britain told us to trust them, so we trusted them,” she said, as rows of riot police watched a few metres away. But the UK “has let us down terribly”.

Protesters surrounded the Hong Kong parliament on Wednesday demanding city leaders scrap a plan to send individuals to face trial in mainland China’s murky legal system, where the ruling Communist Party controls the courts.

Ingraham Angle Promotes Qanta Ahmed’s And Asra Nomani’s Two-Tiered Takiya On Islamic Persecution Of Christians Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/ingraham-angle-promotes

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday June 10, 2019 hosted two so-called “reformist” Muslim women, Qanta Ahmed and Asra Nomani for a discussion of Christian persecution under Islam, which is a shameful, murderous pandemic. Neither woman could deal honestly with the Islamic, Sharia-based roots of this persecution, although certainly Ahmed was much more egregious in her dissimulation/ takiya. Hard data make plain “The Concordance of Sharia ‘Thirst’, Rampant Christian Persecution, and Jew-Hatred in Muslim Societies”. This juxtaposition reveals a striking concordance between Christian persecution by Muslims, the excess prevalence of extreme Antisemitic sentiments within Muslim societies, and Muslim attitudes favoring strict application of the Sharia.

Qanta Ahmed made these egregious pronouncements:

“It [Christian persecution] is also anathema to Islam that reveres Jesus [NO; he’s a Muslim prophet who destroys Christianity], that sees the Gospel as a holy book of God [No; deliberately corrupted version of the Koran]…Islam says everyone has a right to a free will, a right to reject Islam, to reject the truth of God [NO; per Koran 4:89, 2:217; 9:5; 9;29 & canonical hadith, “apostates” are to be killed; jihad to be waged to submit Jews & Christians to limited practice under Sharia jurisdiction if they survive]…So these Muslims are acting beyond the bounds”

She then goes on to extol Qatar for its alleged Catholic ecumenism, and the Kurds—chronic, mass murdering persecutors of Christians, past as prologue.

Asra Nomani was better, but her takiya can be almost as corrosive. She claimed mendaciously that Koran 1:7 is only hateful because of a “Wahhabi interpretation”. This verse in fact has a classical-cum-modern overwhelming (90%) interpretation across 13-centuries, Sunni and Shiite alike, I just carefully reviewed, and it curses the Jews for having incurred Allah’s anger [linking this verse to Koran 5:60, Jews as apes and pigs], and the Christians for having gone astray [linking Koran 1:7 to Koran 5:77]

Here is Asra Nomani, verbatim:

“Why is the cross under attack? It is because the Koran that I have here in the first chapter, the last sentence that we have [she means the Fatiha, Koran 1:6 to 1:7] , we say that we have to stay on the straight path [i.e., Islam] but [what] the Saudi interpretation and how governments like Qatar and Turkey have added is we have to stay on the straight path and not depart from it like the Jews and Christians have done They say that thinking of Jesus as a son of God is like polytheism and that is ultimately worse than murder they say. So that is why you have attacks on the symbol”

Hiding behind ‘Islamophobia’ By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/hiding_behind_islamophobia.html

Jihadists are masters at putting people on the defensive and the term “Islamophobia” is a potent weapon constantly used by them.  Essentially, it shuts down any comment about Islam that is not favorable.  Initially it is the back door to censorship.  Ultimately, it is to establish the Islamic takeover of the West because it obfuscates factual evidence of many of the heinous aspects of sharia law and societies under Islamic rule.

It was “[a]t the end of the 1970s, [when] Iranian fundamentalists invented the term ‘Islamophobia [.]’ The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate.” The term, which is “worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world.”

The lack of specific definition, of course, leaves the door wide open to multiple interpretations, all to the benefit of the jihadists who would use the word to suit their vile purposes.  Thus, “the term ‘Islamophobia’ denies the reality of an Islamic offensive in Europe all the better to justify it [and] it attacks secularism by equating it with fundamentalism.” It silences all those Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practice their faith freely [.]”

Repeatedly, freedom lovers have demonstrated how the term Islamophobia has served its purpose spectacularly well.  It allows Islamic apologists to “silence any criticism of Islam.”  The term has infiltrated Middle East and Islamic Studies and anyone who would monitor mosques for threats to the public order will be denounced. Consequently “child marriages, forced marriages, female seclusion, honor killings, gang rapes of infidel women, or the enslavement and sale of females for sex slavery” cannot be publicized for fear of being accused of racism.

On The Promise Of “Green Jobs” June 12, 2019/ Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-6-12-on-the-promise-of-green-jobs

Sometimes it seems like the biggest selling point advanced in favor of “renewable energy” is the promise of what are called “green jobs.” What are those? Proponents are often vague, but I suppose that the green jobs largely consist of the work of building, installing, and maintaining the vast future farms of windmills and solar panels, and related infrastructure like transmission lines. Since most of these jobs involve some combination of strenuous labor in remote areas and/or a high level of skill, of course they will be very high-paying jobs. Millions of them. What’s not to like about that?

President Obama was an early arrival at the “green jobs” party, tossing out a “plan to create 5 million new green jobs” as part of his 2008 presidential campaign. (Politifact in November 2016 struggles to figure out how many of those jobs ever got created, and if so, where they may be.) You won’t be surprised to learn that Obama’s ideas pretty much all consisted of some variety of government subsidies, programs, mandates, tax credits, “investments,” expenditures, and the like, e.g., a new “job training program for clean technologies,” a new federal “renewable portfolio standard” to force utilities to switch to wind and/or solar generation, extension of the “production tax credit” for wind and solar, and so on and on.

More recently “green jobs” promoters have further upped the ante. In January of this year, Francie Diep of Pacific Standard quoted the Center for American Progress as predicting that a federal “investment” of just $800 billion per year (!) toward cutting carbon emissions to zero would create 6.8 million net new jobs. Meanwhile, the International Labor Organization (part of the UN) put out a study in 2018 predicting that implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement would create some 24 million “net” green new jobs worldwide by 2030. It all sounds like a near-infinite bounty of new wealth.

What’s Wrong with Asking about Citizenship on the Census? By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/whats-wrong-with-asking-about-citizenship-on-the-census/

A donnybrook has broken out over how the administration decided to add a citizenship question to the census. We’ll presumably learn more one way or the other, but it’s worth asking why it is considered such a scandal to ask about citizenship, which is a question on other government surveys and isn’t new on the census. Here is the Census Bureau itself describing what it asks as part of the very important, ongoing American Community Survey and why:

We ask questions about a person’s place of birth, citizenship, and year of entry into the United States to create data about citizens, noncitizens, and the foreign-born population.

 

Agencies and policymakers use our published statistics to set and evaluate immigration policies and laws, understand the experience of different immigrant groups, and enforce laws, policies, and regulations against discrimination based on national origin. These statistics also help tailor services to accommodate cultural differences.

And explaining the origins of these questions:

Citizenship originated with the 1820 Census, place of birth originated with the 1850 Census, and year of entry originated with the 1890 Census. They transferred to the ACS in 2005 when it replaced the decennial census long form.

FLASHBACK: Two Obama-Era Officials Violated Hatch Act But Weren’t Removed from Office By Nicholas Ballasy

https://pjmedia.com/trending/flashback-2-obama-era-officials-violated-hatch-act-but-werent-removed-from-office/

WASHINGTON — The Office of the Special Counsel has recommended the removal of White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway over violations of the Hatch Act.

The OSC wrote that her “violations, if left unpunished, would send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act’s restrictions. Her actions thus erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law.”

This isn’t the first time a White House or cabinet official violated the Hatch Act. It happened several times in the Obama administration but the OSC didn’t recommend the removal of the official.

In 2012, the OSC said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made “extemporaneous partisan remarks” in her official capacity in violation of the Hatch Act. Sebelius acknowledged her remarks were a “mistake” and she was not removed from her position due to the violation.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, who is now a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, violated the Hatch Act in 2016 by praising then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in an interview at his HUD office, but President Obama did not remove him from his position.

Thomas Sowell Talks About Discrimination, Race, And Social Justice By David Hogberg

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/13/an-interview-with-thomas-sowell-on-discrimination-race-and-social-justice/

The famed economist and social theorist sat down to talk about race, discrimination, crime rates, and cultural attitude shifts.

A newly updated version of Thomas Sowell’s book, “Discrimination and Disparities,” came out this spring. The author and famed economist sat down with writer David Hogberg to talk about it and his life’s work.

David Hogberg: I want to read to you something that a currently very popular actress by the name of Brie Larson said at a recent awards show. She stated that, “USC Annenberg’s Inclusiveness Initiative released findings that 67 percent of the top critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males.  Less than a quarter were white women and less than 10 percent were unrepresented men. Only 2.5 percent of those top critics were women of color. Now you’re probably thinking right now that … doesn’t represent the country I live in. And that’s true. This is a huge disconnect from the U.S. population breakdown of 30 percent white men, 30 percent white women, 20 percent men of color, and 20 percent women of color. So, why does that matter? … If you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will be able to see your movie and review your movie … We need to be conscious of our bias and do our part to make sure that everyone is in the room.”

That’s an example of the main fallacy that you expose in your book, correct?

Thomas Sowell:  It’s one of the many fallacies. My God! We could play the same game with basketball and get even greater skewed representation. Blacks are the vast majority of basketball players in the NBA. That quote is downright silly.

What’s become so frustrating to me over the years is people who assume that if people or events are not evenly represented, then that’s some deviation from the norm. But you can read through reams of what scholars have written and find that nowhere is this norm to be found. You can read people like Gradell and others who have studied internationally various cultural events, and they say again and again that nowhere do they find a distribution of people who is representative of the population of the larger society.

So [people like Larson] are taking something that no one can find and making it a norm, the deviations from which should cause the government to intervene to correct this supposedly rare thing.

Hogberg: What is the “Invincible Fallacy”?