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August 2019

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Solar Energy: Good For Virtue Signaling And Not Much Else

By on August 20th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/

There’s a great future in solar, the fossil-fuel haters have been telling us for some time. They might be right. One day. But they’ve been saying that for quite a while, and the future continues to be out there … somewhere.

Not so long ago, the French even thought paving their highways with solar panels was a good idea. But “Three Years Later,” says a Popular Mechanics headline from late last week, “the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop.”

How can this be? Solar, we’ve long been told, will save us all.

“It’s too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” says PM.

France’s Sun Road, known locally as the Wattway — what, nobody thought of Voltabahn or Wattastrada? — was an “experiment that seemed ingenious in its simplicity: fill a road with photovoltaic panels and let them passively soak up the rays as cars drive harmlessly above.”

However, its “most optimistic supporters have deemed” it a “failure,” says PM. It couldn’t handle the weight of heavy trucks, the surface made so much racket that the speed limit had to be lowered to 43 mph, and it’s failed to deliver the power that had been promised.

Flaws include poor location (“Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area,” says Popular Mechanics, to which we add, no area is sunny at night); storms (the climate alarmists will blame global warming for their existence); and questionable design (solar panels work when best directed toward the sun, not arranged flat on the ground as a road bed).

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

St Greta of Thunberg

By on August 20th, 2019

https://quadrant

As Greta Thunberg makes her way across the Atlantic in a high-tech racing yacht built of petro-chemical derivatives and guided by banks of power-hungry onboard computers, the sort of people who maintain the UN’s climate powwows are more than opportunities for Third World kleptocrats’ brothers-in-law and professional scaremongers to live large on other people’s money are strewing her foamy progress with the rose petals of adoration.

James Delingpole sees the voyage in a rather different light, not to mention Saint Greta of Thunberg’s appearance on the cover of GQ magazine:

…What kind of man would be remotely interested in buying a mag whose main feature entailed a finger-wagging lecture (one we’ve all heard a gazillion times before) about how, like, totally endangered the planet is and how totally it’s all our fault and how we’ve got to abandon all the things we hold dear — meat; air travel; fast cars; designer threads — in order to stop all the baby polar bears melting?

A lecture, furthermore, from a child who hasn’t finished her schooling, whose frontal lobes haven’t formed, who has no sense of humour, whose every utterance is the second-hand opinion of alarmist grown-ups whose doomsday claims she is completely unequipped to assess?

No kind of man that I know of, that’s for sure. Unless you count tofu-eating, milquetoast, pantywaist, beta, snowflake, self-flagellating, Mom’s-basement-dwelling, environmental science graduates as men….

And that is Delingpole just getting started.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook My independent team of investigators looked into the complaints, and the company has taken action. By Jon Kyl

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-conservatives-dont-trust-facebook-11566309603

From the Ivy League to Hollywood and the mainstream media, Americans with traditional morals or conservative politics have often felt excluded from the country’s elite, culture-creating institutions. Facebook offered an alternative: a place to express views and share news that you couldn’t find in the New York Times.

Over time, however, many conservatives lost trust in Facebook, believing it discriminated against them. The increasing scale and complexity of Facebook’s content-moderation practices made matters worse. In 2016 Facebook employees were accused of suppressing conservative articles in the news feed’s now-discontinued “trending” section. In April 2018 Congress grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about anticonservative bias, from blocked content to suspended accounts.

In response to mounting criticism, Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time.

Facebook placed no restrictions on how I could conduct the work. My team at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP began conducting interviews in May 2018. We cast a wide net to include as many aspects of conservatism as possible—from organizations focused on Christian values or protecting free expression to those focused on tax policy and small government. We identified individuals, groups and lawmakers who either use, study or could potentially regulate Facebook, and interviewed 133 of them. To encourage them to speak freely, we told interviewees we wouldn’t publish their identities. We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018 and have been discussing them with the company ever since.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Tlaib and Omar expose the Democratic Party for what it has become: the party of Jew-hatred By Patricia McCarthy

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/tlaib_and_omar_expose_the_democrat_party_for_what_it_has_become_the_party_of_jewhatred.html

The latest campaign of the Left, following the exposure of the Russia-collusion hoax as a fabrication from the outset, is to brand President Trump as a racist and to similarly indict his supporters as racists, too.  This is foolish on its face, but that’s the leftists’ plan, and they are sticking to it.  The NYT is leading this shift in the Left’s propaganda campaign, but nearly every anchor on CNN and MSNBC is on board with the enthusiasm of children at the circus.  Everyone who voted for Trump is a racist.  If we vote for Trump in 2020, we are racists.  Those who attend a Trump rally are racists.  All white men are racists, of course, and dangerous to all.  The foolish words uttered on those two cable outlets are outrageous.

It is the Left as well that is so invested in the “science” of trangenderism.  Leftists willingly promote the notion persons born as male can legitimately become female and compete fairly against girls and women in sports.  They have no problem with them winning over and over and over again.  But in fact, there are still only two sexes yet an abundance of seeming gender dysphoria, gleefully encouraged by the LGBT “community” and the Left’s capitulation to it.

How many young lives are being destroyed by what has become a fad of the “woke” people?  The Left does not care about lives destroyed.  If it did, it would fix the border crisis and save the thousands of young girls being trafficked there.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Why Pelosi is surrendering the Democratic Party to the Jew-haters By Thomas Lifson

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/why_pelosi_is_surrendering_the_democratic_party_to_the_jewhaters.html

“Driven by the personal ambition of a craven politician clinging to power, the Democrats revert to their historic embrace of bigotry, as in their support of slavery and Jim Crow.”

A historic transition of the American political landscape is underway, as the older of our two parties is embracing antisemitism and moving away from support of Israel, driven by the personal ambition of a craven politician clinging to power.  Nancy Pelosi’s desire to remain speaker of the House is why she is surrendering the Democrats’ party to the Jew-haters, with the highly visible, openly antisemitic Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib becoming the real face of her party.

No fewer than seven of Pelosi’s key political allies are facing primary challenges, just as did her close, long-serving ally Joe Crowley in 2018, birthing the political career of a comely former bartender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  All of these senior Democrats realize that in low-turnout primaries, a highly motivated faction can deliver the nomination to a challenger.  Jennifer Shutt of Roll Call examines the challenges that are scaring Pelosi, staring with Rep. Nita Lowey:

Mondaire Jones, a former Obama administration Justice Department staffer and attorney for Westchester County’s Law Department, [will] challenge Lowey in next June’s primary. The 32-year-old political novice plans to take on the New York Democratic incumbent over her positions on issues ranging from climate change to student debt forgiveness to oversight of the Trump administration.

[One] hopes the same sentiment that propelled young progressives to victory in the last election cycle — with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of longtime New York Democrat Joseph Crowley the most famous example — will resonate with voters throughout New York’s Rockland and Westchester counties.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Common Core And Screen Overdoses Are Ruining American Kids’ Intelligence By Auguste Meyrat

By on August 20th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/common-core-screen-overdoses-ruining-american-kids-intelligence/

Between ineffective teaching methods at school and an overdose of screen time at home, our children are becoming intellectually deficient. We need to reverse the trends.

By every metric (SAT, ACT, and even IQ), the intelligence and aptitude of American students has declined in recent years. As Joy Pullmann documents in an article about the results of using Common Core, student performance on state standardized tests has also gone down — that is, when the scoring isn’t changed to show better results.

Before casting blame on who’s responsible, it’s important to understand what these numbers actually mean. All of these tests attempt to measure higher-order thinking skills as they relate to abstract scenarios, nothing more or less. They do not measure the level of practical skills people might have, their emotional intelligence, or even their actual knowledge of things.

Rather, they assess students’ critical thinking (the ability to analyze), problem solving, and knowledge application. People who have these higher-order thinking skills are generally more adaptable to any kind of learning, particularly the kind of learning that happens in higher education.

Higher-order thinking is also important in a time most activities are computerized and information comes in abstract forms such as images and text. American students who lack these skills will struggle much more when most jobs and other domains in life (communication, management, choosing a lifestyle, etc.) demand this of them.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

What The 1619 Project Leaves Out By Jim Geraghty

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-1619-project-leaves-out/

“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” The New York Times Magazine editors declare. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The scale of the opening offering is massive by the standards of modern journalism: 100 pages (with a few ads), ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of original poems and stories from 16 additional writers.

But the 1619 Project’s effort to “reframe American history” requires cropping out some significant figures in African-American history. Perhaps no near-100-page collection of essays, poems and photos could cover every significant figure in African-American history, but the number of prominent figures who never even get mentioned or who get only the most cursory treatment is pretty surprising.

Early in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, she reiterates the important point, “in every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.” The name Crispus Attucks is mentioned three times, but he is, as far as I can tell, the lone black Revolutionary War combatant mentioned. James Armistead was a spy for Lafayette who had access to General Cornwallis’s headquarters. Back in 1996, the New York Times wrote about the First Rhode Island Regiment, who fought at Newport and Pine’s Bridge, and in a regrouped form, Yorktown. By one account, one-quarter of the American forces at the battle of Yorktown were black. The 1619 Project does not mention the Battle of Yorktown.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Beto and the Press Throw America under the Bus By Rich Lowry

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/beto-orourke-democrats-condemn-america-as-racist/

Slavery was America’s grave sin, but to pretend racism is the essence of the country is an odious and reductive lie.

Beto O’Rourke has taken the measure of America and found it wanting.

“This country, though we would like to think otherwise,” he intoned over the weekend, “was founded on racism, has persisted through racism, and is racist today.”

This is now a mainstream sentiment in the Democratic party. Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.” The New York Times has begun the so-called 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of the importation of slaves from Africa.

The series seeks nothing less than “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

It is certainly true that an American nation existed prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and that slavery was its great sin, with permutations still felt today. But to pretend that racism is the essence of America and constituted one of the country’s founding principles is an odious and reductive lie.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Progressive Democrats Renounce Their Former Selves By Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/progressive-democratic-candidates-renounce-former-centrist-views/

Not long ago, the current presidential contenders opposed open borders, sanctuary cities, and federal funding for abortion. Now they can’t move left far and fast enough.

All politicians are “flexible.” If they are in politics long enough, many reinvent themselves ideologically several times over — given the perceived volatile mood of 51 percent of their constituency.

But rarely have we seen an entire primary field of candidates scrambling to renounce all their past identities and agendas — and to do so unapologetically, abruptly, and vehemently.

Apparently, they believe, at least in the primary, that the electorate will either identify as nonwhite, or far left, or both — and thus resent deeply any who are not.

To win the nomination, almost all the leading candidates on the Democratic debate stage now believe that they must renounce almost everything they once stood for — at least for a while. Given that most are white or affluent or children of privilege, or all three, sometimes the metamorphosis becomes low comedy.

Their rational seems to be that 1) no one will remember what they once promoted anyway, 2) everyone will give them a pass when, if nominated, they run in the general election on some of what they just renounced in the primaries, and 3) they really believe that mass immigration and declining demography has made America a nonwhite nation, that some sort of DNA identification badge will allow all of us to find and belong to the right racial caste, and that our superficial identities will govern everything we do, say, and believe (as happened in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia).

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Denmark: How to Deal with Integration? by Judith Bergman

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14563/denmark-immigration-integration

How does a society deal with religious institutions that profess values which are the very opposite of the value system of the Western society in which they live?

“When I was in high school, there were around 50,000 people with a non-Western background in Denmark. Today, there are almost half a million. In one generation, our country has changed”. — Lars Løkke Rasmussen, then prime minister of Denmark, January 1, 2019.

The Integration Barometer — which measures the degree of assimilation in the municipality among young people with a non-Western background — showed that almost one third of 18-29 year-olds (31%) believe that “religious and cultural laws must be adhered to, even though they may be contrary to [Danish] law”. The issue, then, is whether these young people believe that Islamic sharia law should take precedence over Danish law…. In addition, the number of youths who view democracy in a positive light has fallen from 86% in 2016 to 79% in 2018.

It recently came to light… that a committee under the government’s Ministry of Church Affairs, which is responsible for formally approving mosques in Denmark, has been handing out approvals for them without knowing “whether they [the mosques] were ruled from abroad, whether women’s rights were suppressed, or there were other problematic conditions”. Formal approval of a mosque means that the mosque becomes eligible for tax benefits and is permitted to bring foreign preachers to Denmark on a special visa.

When the association behind the mosque [asked]… to be approved as a religious community, it had in its statutes a provision saying it operated under the supervision of Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At first, this news was a matter of concern for the Ministry of Church Affairs, but then Ahlul Bait simply rewrote its statutes and the ministry gave its approval.

Earlier this year, in his New Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister at the time, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, mentioned that religious parallel societies constitute a problem and that immigrants need to learn to “put secular laws over religious ones”.

What, however, if, in the community involved, there seems no desire to do that?

“When I was in high school”, Rasmussen continued “there were around 50,000 people with a non-Western background in Denmark. Today, there are almost half a million. In one generation, our country has changed”.

Just how great are the problems was revealed in a recent survey, Integrations Barometer 2018, published by the municipality of Copenhagen. The Integration Barometer — which measures the degree of integration in the municipality among young people with a non-Western background — showed that almost one third of 18-29 year-olds (31%) believe that “religious and cultural laws must be adhered to, even though they may be contrary to [Danish] law”.[1] The issue, then, is whether these young people believe that Islamic sharia law should take precedence over Danish law. The statistic represents an increase from 2016, when a similar survey showed that 24% wanted sharia law. In addition, the number of youths who view democracy in a positive light has fallen from 86% in 2016 to 79% in 2018[2].

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