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September 2019

Why Ban Plastic Straws? By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/plastic-straw-bans-posturing-scientifically-informed-global-effort-needed/

What’s needed is a proportionate, scientific approach — not mere posturing.

I suppose this is what they call a “First World problem,” so humor me. It’s 8.30 a.m. I’ve just finished at the gym. I’m in line to get my breakfast smoothie. I wait, as patient people ought, till the voice crieth “Order for Muh-dy,” and I think, as a kind person should, Close enough. I smile as my change is handed to me. I pout. I sip . . . then:

*$&*%#%! This straw is made of paper. And now — owing to an entirely foreseeable combination of suction and saliva — it is disintegrating in my mouth. Whose idea was this?!

Please don’t pretend. I know you know what I’m talking about . . .

Recall the following science from the 1967 hit movie The Graduate:

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

How Hard Are Democrats Trying To Lose In 2020? Their cockiness can be seen in the degree to which Democrats act as if they have stopped caring about persuading swing voters. Warren Henry

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/23/how-hard-are-democrats-trying-to-lose-in-2020/

Democrats are feeling pretty cocky about the upcoming presidential campaign. They look at polls showing their top three candidates all lead President Trump and start feeling like it doesn’t matter who they nominate.

Many Democrats forget that four years ago, polls showed Donald Trump as the only Republican losing to Hillary Clinton. They also forget that the Republicans are raising tons of cash to spend on ads defining Democrats’ nominee. Their cockiness can be seen in the degree to which Democrats act as if they have stopped caring about persuading swing voters.

In fairness, both sides are focused on a base turnout strategy for 2020 over a persuasion strategy. Team Trump may have the financial advantage necessary to work on expanding the electoral map, at a minimum causing his opponent to spend time and money on states a Democrat would like to take for granted. The president will also continue pitching moderates on his record, because he is always closing. Nevertheless, his campaign is founded on retaining the coalition that won 2016.

Democrats have their own base turnout strategy. Their current debate over “electability“ assumes they can win if they turn out the “rising American electorate” of unmarried women, minorities, and younger voters. They don’t remember—or don’t want to remember—that Barack Obama may not have eagerly sought votes from blue-collar white voters, but he made the effort not to lose too many of them.

Nate Cohn, who covers elections, polling, and demographics for The New York Times, recently warned Democrats on Twitter: “I think the salience of ‘persuasion’ in elections – whether voters flipping is a major force explaining variance in election results – might be the single area where I most completely disagree with the conventional wisdom on Twitter, or at least what the CW looks like to me. My ‘interactions’ are full of people asserting things like: there are no swing voters; the only thing that changed in 2018 is turnout, Democrats can’t and haven’t won over any Trump voters. And whatever you think of the optimal strategy for Democrats, this is all facially untrue… In our final polls of GA06, IL14, CA48 over the last days of the race, the sample was R+6 or more in all. Dems led in all, and ultimately won. Dems had huge inroads with past GOP voters.”

Media Corruption On Perfect Display In One Washington Post Paragraph Every single assertion of this paragraph isn’t just wrong, but the opposite of right. In each sentence, Trump is being blamed for things his political opponents have done.By Mollie Hemingway

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/23/media-corruption-on-perfect-display-in-one-washington-post-paragraph/

ABC News’ White House correspondent Karen Travers approvingly tweeted out a paragraph of a front-page Washington Post rant written by Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Rachel Bade. The paragraph comes from their cri de coeur headlined “Trump’s Ukraine Call Reveals A President Convinced Of His Own Invincibility.”

While the article matches the headline in its extreme bias and shrill outpouring of opinion — seemingly written by the Democratic National Committee’s newest batch of enthusiastic interns — it is presented as if it’s news, a common problem with our current media culture. Here’s the paragraph:

Every single assertion of this paragraph isn’t just wrong, but the opposite of right. In each sentence, Trump is being blamed for things his political opponents have done. Let’s take a look at some examples.

Trump’s sense of himself as above the law has been reinforced throughout his time in office.

In fact, the main problem during the Trump administration has been the way the self-annointed “Resistance” in the media, unelected bureaucracy, and political institutions have treated Trump as if he were below the law. Traditionally, hard-fought losses are usually followed by an acceptance of the reality of election results, even if grudgingly.

In the case of Donald Trump, his campaign was spied on prior to the election by the intelligence services and government apparatus controlled by the opposing party. They used wiretaps, national security letters, human informants, and other surveillance. His transition was undermined by leaks suggesting that the FBI took seriously an uncorroborated and ludicrous collection of tall tales, “research” later determined to have been secretly funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Sen. Chris Coons: Trump’s “Baseless” Smear About Biden And Ukraine Is Like Hillary’s Emails All Over Again Posted By Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/09/22/sen_chris_coons_trump_views_biden_as_greatest_threat_to_his_re-election.html

Sen. Chris Coons, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MSNBC’s David Gura that he believes Trump must release the transcript of the call with the Ukrainian president that is said to be the subject of a whistleblower complaint. He also said that President Trump’s allegation that Joe Biden’s son profited off a corrupt business deal in Ukraine is a “baseless allegation” like Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“My gut reaction is ‘here we go again.’ In the 2016 campaign, President Trump repeated baseless allegations about Hillary’s emails over and over and over, to the point where the average voter couldn’t really tell you what it was actually about, but they just had the vague impression that something inappropriate had happened,” Coons said about Trump’s accusation. “That is exactly what President Trump is trying to do here, and I hope that both the media won’t take the bait and simply repeat these baseless allegations.”

Evidence that Iran Violated the Nuclear Deal Since Day One? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14910/iran-nuclear-deal-violations

The IAEA first ignored the reports about Iran’s undeclared clandestine nuclear facilities. This should not come as a surprise: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities.

New evidence shows that Iran’s theocratic establishment was most likely violating the nuclear agreement since the day that Obama’s administration and Tehran struck the deal in 2015.

The international community would truly do itself a great service to recognize that the nuclear deal was nothing more than a pro-mullah agreement which provided Iran’s ruling clerics with billions of dollars to pursue their anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Iranian people and pro-terror activities, while simultaneously providing cover for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions.

The Iranian government is advancing its nuclear program at a faster pace. Recently, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) declared that Tehran took the third step in increasing its nuclear activities by activating advanced centrifuges: 20 IR-4 and 20 IR-6 centrifuges.

Nancy Pelosi’s Constitution Editorial of The New York Sun

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/nancy-pelosis-constitution/90842/

Go ahead, make our day. That’s our reaction to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call for a new law to provide for the indictment of a sitting president. The California Democrat endorses the idea, telling NPR that a president “should be indicted, if he’s committed a wrongdoing — any president.” Adds she: “There is nothing anyplace that says the president should not be indicted.”

Except in the Constitution, where the bar against indicting a sitting president is hiding in plain sight. It lurks in the logic of separated powers. And also in the stinginess with which the Constitution parcels out the power — and obligation — to take care that our laws be faithfully executed. That power is granted to the President alone — and his alone is the obligation.

It certainly doesn’t go to the Congress. Not only does the Constitution fail to grant to Congress the power to take care that our laws are faithfully executed. It also pointedly — with the prohibition on bills of attainder — forbids the Congress condemning individuals. The fact is that the Founders just didn’t trust the Congress to faithfully execute the laws it passed.

Nor is the power to execute faithfully our laws granted to the courts, whose pointedly particular powers are parsimoniously parcelled out in the parchment. The judicial power of the United States, the Supreme Court has marked, is limited to only actual cases and controversies. The courts can’t initiate cases; that is left to prosecutors or civil litigants. The courts can but decide them.

Rush To Renewable Energy Doesn’t Match Up With Basic Tenets Of Science, Economics Henry I. Miller and Andrew I. Fillat

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/22/resist-being-brainwashed-on

Whether it’s the Green New Deal, in which climate change abatement is only one of several radical proposals, or the general brainwashing of the younger generations about the impending end of the world, the absence of rational analysis and the willful ignorance of facts is counterproductive. Rather than promoting a feasible approach to dealing with climate change, the magnitude of which remains uncertain, the focus is on unfeasible approaches and unachievable goals. Leaders from around the world will be at it in earnest this week during the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019.

Many approaches to climate change are analogous to saying that the best way to produce energy is to build perpetual-motion machines, which perform work indefinitely without an energy source — a concept that violates the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the goal is laudable, but the means to achieve it is, literally, fantastic. In the case of climate change, the anti-hydrocarbon contingent seeks to violate basic tenets of science and economics.

The reality is that there are insurmountable or cost-prohibitive obstacles to the scale-up of renewable energy and to creating the necessary infrastructure for it. Here are some facts that provide a reality check:

Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.
Likewise, with respect to efficiency, wind conversion to electricity is already approximately two-thirds of the way to the maximum physical limit. The number of wind turbines would need to increase massively.
A single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic (produced from hydrocarbons and not recyclable). Solar is even more resource consumptive.
The mining of silver, indium, and rare earths would have to soar by up to 20-fold over today’s yields just to meet the Paris climate accord’s goals. The mining process (for both those minerals and for battery materials) itself is dirty, ecologically destructive, and consumes significant amounts of hydrocarbon energy; and the plastic needed for solar and wind requires hydrocarbons.
No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.
To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.
Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.
A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.
Neither batteries nor wind nor solar equipment lasts forever. Currently available, state-of-the-art batteries have a useful life of just seven years, leading to massive disposal and pollution issues. And all the steel and other elements of retired equipment need to go somewhere.
A shale-oil rig produces almost 15 times as much energy per hour/day/year as two 500-foot turbines turning in the wind. Putting it another way, one producing rig is the equivalent of 30 wind turbines.
Wind turbine farms are unsightly and kill huge numbers of birds.
The intermittent nature of wind and solar imposes huge infrastructure and operating costs due to the necessary continual re-balancing of the electrical grid. Extensive reliable backup sources are needed in the absence of massive batteries at every wind or solar site, which inevitably will consume hydrocarbons.

Trump’s peace deal – anything in it for Jordan? Jordan’s response to the economic component of the deal was that cash offers cannot replace a political solution. But some Jordanian officials reportedly believe the country could – and should – profit from any plan that promises billions in economic aid.by Neville Teller

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/09/22/trumps-peace-deal-anything-in-it-for-jordan/

Jordan presents itself to the world as a constitutional monarchy – a state supporting a multiparty political system, an elected parliament, and a prime minister who is the head of government.

Constitutional experts beg to differ. Most maintain that Jordan is an autocracy in which authoritarian power is exercised by the king through legal manipulation, described by the Journal of Democracy as “selective economic reforms, new civil society regulations, and hollow pluralism initiatives.” In fact, the king is the country’s ultimate authority in respect of all three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial. He appoints the prime minister and chooses the cabinet. The judges are appointed and dismissed by royal decree. Political parties were legalized in 1992 provided they acknowledge the legitimacy of the monarchy.

These democratically dubious constitutional arrangements do not, however, affect the popularity of the monarchy, and there is no demand within Jordan for constitutional change. However, the usual consequences of autocratic rule – corruption, unemployment, poverty, high taxes, rising food prices, and poor government services – regularly result in outbursts of popular protest. Over the course of 2019, the scale and depth of Jordan’s economic problems have been unprecedented, and massive public demonstrations have been the result.

In May and June, the public took to the streets in great numbers to protest increased taxes and soaring prices. The rebellion was nationwide, uniting all sectors of Jordanian society. In response, King Abdullah dismissed the government, froze prices, and appointed a new prime minister, Omar al-Razzaz, whom he ordered to produce reforms.

The 2019 “Muslim Man Of The Year”, The Antisemitism Envoy, and The Pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/09/the-2019-muslim-man-of-the-year-the-antisemitism-envoy-and-the-pandemic-of-muslim-antisemitism/

Appositely, Columbia University Jewish students are protesting the slated appearance of “proud” Jew-hating Malaysian Muslim Prime Minister Mahathir ibn Mohamad, Wednesday, September 25th at Columbia’s World Leadership Forum. Their protest petition references a comment this bigoted Muslim head of state made October 16, 2003, at the Putrajaya (Malaysia) summit for the leaders of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now dubbed Organization of Islamic Cooperation), a de facto Sharia supremacist global Islamintern.

…the Jews rule this world by proxy and get others to fight and die for them.

But this isolated remark is completely de-contextualized from Mohamad’s mainstream Muslim worldview, rooted in sacralized Islamic jihadism and Jew-hatred, which these overarching statements from the same 2003 address, elucidate:

To begin with, the governments of all the Muslim countries can close ranks and have a common stand…on Palestine…We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships…We may want to re-create the first century of the Hijrah, the way of life in those times, in order to practice what we think to be the true Islamic way of life. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategize and then to counter-attack. As Muslims, we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet (i.e., Muhammad who waged a bloody proto-jihad which slaughtered and subjugated the Medinan Jews). Surely the 23 years’ struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do.

 

Moreover the Columbia student protest petition also ignores this baleful reality: Mahathir Mohamad was designated the 2019 Muslim Man Of The Year in the 2019 Muslim 500, a yearly publication of the highly influential, mainstream, moderate Jordanian Muslim think tank, The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Institute/Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, renowned for its very active role in “interfaith dialogue.”    

China, One World Two Systems? by Francesco Sisci

http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/china-one-world-two-systems/
 
How Hong Kong’s and China’s position in the world is no longer tenable, as it was seen 20 years ago.

In the late 1990s, Beijing decided to adhere to the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO), which was to replace GATT (General Agreement on Tariff and Trade), regulating trade in the free world that had been battling the Soviet empire. The USA, leading those talks and promoting the new organization, had settled on allowing a grace period for China to fully integrate into the global system. This system was not just commercial, but also political.

China had then barely managed to skirt the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, which brought down governments and regimes all over Asia and proved in this part of the world that the US was the paramount example of a well-managed economic system. In the previous decade, the US also caused the USSR to disband and later overawed the Europeans, whose monetary system was disrupted by the 1992 financial crisis. The euro, then an objective challenge to dollar dominance, had been approved by the EU but only in return for an eastward expansion of the Union, something that would weaken European ability to easily reach a unified consensus on the moves of the new currency.

Basically, in the late 1990s, the USA and China agreed on establishing a situation parallel to that of Hong Kong. The territory had just in 1997 been returned to Beijing under the principle of “one country, two systems” (一国两制): that is, China and Hong Kong were to be run according to different sets of rules, although both agreed they belonged to one China and eventually they would be united under one rule. Similarly, China was joining the WTO under the provision that we could call new “one world, two systems”, or to be more Chinese: “one heaven, two systems” (一天两制). The two systems were to be run differently although both understood they would eventually merge into one – the free market/free politics one would spread all over the world.