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September 2020

ELECTIONS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Francis Menton: The Biden Energy Plan is a Joke

By on September 10th, 2020

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=618a2a8c73

In any rational world, a candidate proposing the energy plan that Joe Biden has proposed for the United States would be laughed out of the race for President on that ground alone. The word “unserious” does not remotely begin to describe the situation. In essence Biden says he will cause a complete transformation of the U.S. energy economy within 30 years — or maybe it’s 15 — with no idea what technology might be able to accomplish that, how much it might cost, or how much poorer the effort might make the American people. We have moved from the real world into the realm of fantasy and gaslighting. And yet, at least as of today, Biden continues to lead in most polls.

The Biden campaign calls his proposals the “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Climate Justice.” A few excerpts:

Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. . . . As president, Biden will lead the world to address the climate emergency and lead through the power of example, by ensuring the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050. . . . He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that. He will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets. . . .

Read through the whole thing, and you will find next-to-no specifics as to how such goals might be accomplished. However, if you do get deep enough into the document, you will begin to realize that the promises made depend totally on fantasies about the development of technologies that don’t currently exist and in all likelihood never will exist, at least in any economically viable form:

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian claim examined Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on September 10th, 2020

https://bit.ly/3bLqm3k

Are Palestinians the descendants of the original inhabitants (Canaanites) of the Land of Israel, as claimed by the Palestinian Authority, or are they descendants of recent waves of immigration?

Systematic Arab migration within the Middle East

Arab migration within the Middle East – including to/from the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – has been an intrinsic feature of the region for millennia.
Illinois University Economics Prof. Fred Gottheil wrote (The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931): “According to the International Labor Organization, Middle East migrant workers – moving within and beyond the Middle East – make up approximately 9% of the world’s total.”

According to the Geneva-based Global Commission on International Migration, “The world’s highest share of migrant population is to be found in the Middle East.”
The scope of Egyptian emigration is highlighted by the Washington, DC-based Migration Policy Institute: “More than 6 million Egyptian emigrants lived in the Middle East North Africa region as of 2016, primarily in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.”

This busy traffic of Arab migrants was, also, prevalent during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, when Arab/Muslim emigrants – many of them from Egypt – pursued a better standard of living in various parts of the globe, including Ottoman and British-ruled Palestine.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

KINDLY DISMOUNT YOUR HIGH HORSES AND STOP VIRTUE SIGNALING

By on September 10th, 2020

 Please stop abetting the left by declaring that Trump was not your first choice or that you are troubled by his character or that the tweets are annoying you and all the reluctance and virtue signaling. The hour is late.

Only a resounding victory for the re-election of Donald Trump can derail the Democrat determination to create post election challenges and chaos. If he loses abandon all hope. rsk

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Dr. Fauci Defends President Trump From Woodward Attack, Says Trump Told Public ‘the Reality of What Was Going On’ By Matt Margolis

By on September 10th, 2020

woodward-attack-says-trump-told-public-the-reality-of-what-was-going-on-n911707

Reports on Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book Rage have the usual suspects accusing President Trump of irresponsibly downplaying the COVID-19 virus. Trump being accused of downplaying the virus is nothing new.

“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump said.

Trump’s critics have taken this to mean that Trump was misleading the American public about the severity of the disease—an allegation disputed by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

During an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, Dr. Fauci disputed the notion that Trump ever downplayed the coronavirus. According to Fauci, Trump’s public statements were no different than sentiments expressed during White House Task Force meetings.

“In my discussions and the discussions of other task force members with the president, we were talking about the reality of what was going on, and then we would get up in front of the press conferences … he really didn’t say anything different than we discussed when we were with him.”

“I didn’t really see any discrepancies between what he told us and what we told him in what he ultimately came out publicly and said.”

“Did you get a sense that [President Trump] was or wasn’t playing this down?” Fox News’ John Roberts asked.

“No, no, I didn’t. I didn’t get any sense that he was distorting anything,” Fauci replied. “In my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had. We related that to him. When he would go out, I’d hear him discussing the same sort of things.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How to Steal an Election… and Get Away with It By David Solway *****

By on September 10th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/09/09/how-to-steal-an-election-and-get-away-with-it-n913707

There is only one way that Donald Trump can lose the forthcoming election, and that is if it is stolen from him outright. A fair election would likely lead to a landslide triumph for the incumbent president, but a fair election is precisely what the hard-left Democrats appear to have no intention of permitting.

The methods they will deploy to ensure a Biden victory are pretty well known to anyone who has been paying attention: vote harvesting, counting mail-in ballots (“at least once,” as Rick Moran writes), the dead vote, the multiple vote, the illegal immigrant vote, polling booth intimidation, a media blitzkrieg, Big Tech platform censorship, state pressure on the Electoral College, and anything else a felonious party can come up with. Indeed, this swindle-in-the-making should be screamingly obvious, but I have encountered far too many people who have swallowed the leftist Kool-Aid in a single gulp, true believers ripe for electoral trickery and political dissimulation.

Naturally, the mainstream media are presenting the process the other way round. For example, USA Today claims that the Democrats should be planning to prevent Trump from stealing the election. Leftist organizations like MoveOn.org and Michelle Obama’s voter registration group are strenuously lobbying for mail-in voting. Can one really wonder why? Leftist sites like The New York Times, Salon, The New Stateman, and legions of others are already interpreting Trump’s very reasonable suspicion of easily faked, replicated, and concocted mail-in ballots as a sign of his nefarious intent.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests By Edward Ring

By on September 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/09/environmentalists-destroyed-californias-

The catastrophic fires that have immolated millions of acres of forests in the Golden State were preventable, and for decades, everyone knew what had to be done.

Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The ‘Woke’ Indifference to Jew Hatred by Judith Bergman

By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16311/woke-jew-hatred

Twitter itself plays a significant role in promoting anti-Semitism.

Despite thousands of complaints, Twitter left most of the rapper’s (Wiley’s) tweets up for six days and only decided to ban him for life after a 48-hour boycott of the platform by thousands of British users, including Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Twitter has even tried to claim that the genocidal variety of Jew hatred, the kind at which Iran’s leaders excel, does not violate its rules.

It appears that the self-righteous outrage of the wokerati is absent when the person at the receiving end of racism is a Jew.

Jew hatred in the United States has grown more prevalent in recent years.. In 2019, there were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents, according to a May report by the Anti-Defamation League. It was the highest number in 40 years. The incidents included 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism.

Antisemitism is also peaking in several European countries: In 2019, Germany, with 2,032 incidents, saw the highest number of anti-Semitic crimes in nearly two decades. The United Kingdom registered “a record number” of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 for the fourth year in a row with 1,805 incidents — “the highest number ever logged in a calendar year and a 7% increase on 2018”, according to a report in The Guardian. In France, anti-Semitic attacks surged by 74% in 2018 compared to the previous year and an additional 27% in 2019. One violent attack in 2018 was the brutal murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old French Jewish Holocaust survivor, who was murdered in her Paris apartment by two men, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they stabbed her 11 times and set her apartment on fire.

The growth in anti-Semitism comes a mere 80 years after millions of Jews were rounded up in Europe and subjected to enslavement, mass shootings, “medical experiments”, and industrial mass murder in Nazi concentration camps, for no other reason than being Jewish.

In our hypersensitive, hyper-racialized “woke” culture, where speaking obvious truths such as “all lives matter” will get you immediately cancelled, terminated from your job and classified as racist, one would assume that the rise in anti-Semitism would prompt maximum outrage. Promoting anti-Semitism, however, rarely gets anyone — apart from the occasional white supremacist — cancelled. This double-standard continues despite hate speech being generally considered completely unacceptable and dangerous, as reflected in the policies against hate speech of the social media and tech giants.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Threatens Total Economic War by Dumping Treasuries: Be My Guest by Gordon G. Chang

By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16485/china-threatens-dumping-treasuries

China’s Communist Party publicly talking about an American default is… essentially a declaration of intent to destroy the American economy. Washington should fight back.

No amount of persuading, cajoling or badgering has worked to convince China to accept agreements and norms.

Trump can hasten the departure of businesses from Chinese soil with tariffs and administrative measures restricting international commerce. The loss of access to the U.S. market would shake China. Last year, China’s merchandise trade surplus against America amounted to 81.8% of its overall merchandise trade surplus, showing extreme dependence on the American market…. Trump can also order American companies to end their technical cooperation agreements with Chinese entities, prohibit portfolio investments in Chinese markets, and end all sales of tech products.

China may not recover from such actions. Case in point: There is now talk that Huawei Technologies, which six months ago looked as if it would take over the world’s 5G networks, may go out of business because it is having difficulty buying chips to install in equipment

Many Americans have been intimidated, saying Washington cannot oppose China because it owns Treasury debt. That is a hollow threat… The net result of China carrying through on its threat is to leave U.S. Treasury obligations in the hands of countries far more friendly to the United States.

On September 3, the Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, reported that Beijing was “likely” to sell some or all of its U.S. Treasury holdings.

More important, the paper suggested the United States might for the first time ever default on its debt obligations.

China is certainly trying to destabilize the United States, and it looks as if it’s about to declare total economic war on America.

Beijing has tipped its hand. The question for the Trump administration, therefore, is whether America should strike first.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Private School Primacy? It’s back-to-school decision time for many parents. By Larry Sand

By on September 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/09/private-school-primacy/

With schools set to reopen, it’s time for parents to choose how best to proceed with their children’s education in our COVID-obsessed country. If there is no in-school option, how many will stick with online education from their local public school? And how many will opt to home school or select a private school, many of which will have traditional learning or at least more rigorous online learning?

While it is too soon to have a definitive answer, here are a few bones to chew on. According to a recent Civis poll, about 40 percent of parents of k-12 students nationwide say that they have “disenrolled their children from the school they were originally supposed to attend this year, in response to school reopening plans.” And of those who have removed their kids, 20 percent have signed them up at a private school.

Here in southern California, school districts are taking a hit, though primarily in lower grades. As reported by the Los Angeles Times Howard Blume, kindergarten enrollment in LAUSD is down 14 percent from last year.

Many who choose private schools will soon discover the difference between them and the public school variety. A recent survey conducted by Dick Carpenter and Josh Dunn, professors at the University of Colorado, speaks volumes. They found that in the spring, 89 percent of private school children received live, online instruction by their teachers, but only 56 percent of public school children did. They also report that 65 percent of private school parents said their teachers “graded student assignments and those grades played an important part in the overall assessment for the year,” but that was true for just a third of public school children.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Democrat Election Plan: Chaos The threat is real, and it’s coming. Big time. Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/democrat-election-plan-chaos-kenneth-r-timmerman/

Options traders who specialize in hedging against risk get it. According to a recent report from FoxBusiness, “the options markets are signaling the very real possibility that neither President Trump nor Joe Biden will be the clear-cut winner on Election Day, Nov. 3.”

Instead of a clear-cut victor there will be chaos. So-called “peaceful” protests. Media outrage. Riots.

And the chaos will all be aimed at one goal: changing the outcome of the election, which otherwise the Democrats are sure to lose.

How can I say this?

Because I’ve been studying the Democrats’ game plan for the past eight years, since I was a Republican nominee for Congress in Maryland in 2012.

I saw first-hand many of the tactics that a former Democrat Party election operative recently revealed in a stunning insider’s account published by the New York Post.

The operative, a self-styled Bernie Sanders supporter, accomplished his dirty work for years in New Jersey, and “led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania,” the Post reported on August 29.

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