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April 2022

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

I agree with scientists and journalists that damaging cold weather is caused by climate change By Jack Hellner ****

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/i_agree_with_scientists_and_journalists_that_damaging_cold_weather_is_caused_by_climate_change.html

“It appears that the passage of time is the best explanation for climate change.”

Scientific data shows that the climate has consistently and naturally changed for billions of years, so yes, when we have late damaging frosts, they are caused by natural climate change. I hope a lot of money and time wasn’t wasted in coming to this logical conclusion. 

Late frost ices over French vineyards, threatens fruit crops

French vintners are lighting candles to thaw their grapevines to save them from a late frost following a mild winter (snip)

 The frost is particularly frustrating after a similar phenomenon hit French vineyards last year, leading to some 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in losses. Scientists later found that the damaging 2021 frost was made more likely by climate change.

What didn’t cause late frosts is warming, supposedly caused by fossil fuel usage, rising CO2, humans, methane, cars and so many other things that the media, scientists, and others say we must stop using. It is a simple concept that fossil fuels and humans can’t cause both warming and cooling.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Stinging rebuke to woke Oberlin College By David Zukerman

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/stinging_rebuke_to_woke_oberlin_college_.html

It might be said that an Ohio appellate court, March 31, struck a blow against woke-ism by upholding a multimillion-dollar verdict against Oberlin College. At issue was a tortious response by the college to a shoplifting incident, November 9, 2016, at Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin. The incident led to protests by Oberlin students and administrators against the bakery, accusing the owners of racism and a history of racial profiling. (A black male student had been apprehended by a bakery employee for shoplifting and he and two black women were arrested in connection with the incident.  In August 2017 they pleaded guilty to lesser charges.)

The bakery and its owners, Allyn W. Gibson and his son David R. Gibson (both now deceased), sued the college and its dean of students for libel, interference with business relationships, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, winning  a jury verdict of $44 million, reduced to $31 million (comprising compensatory and punitive damages, and including attorney’s fees of $6 million).

In upholding the judgment of the trial court, the appellate panel affirmed that the attacks on the bakery were actionable, not opinion, and that the plaintiffs were not public figures.  A woke court, arguably, would have ruled that a flyer distributed by college administrators and students accusing the bakery of racism and racial profile was merely opinion  The appellate ruling noted, however, that the bakery and its owners had not voluntarily injected themselves into the controversy at issue, nor in the “extreme public criticism” that followed. This ruling rejected the claim of the college that the plaintiffs were public figures — and therefore the applicable standard for libel should have “actual malice” not negligence.

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HISTORY, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Ethnic Cleansing of the Pandits of Kashmir By Janet Levy

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_ethnic_cleansing_of_the_pandits_of_kashmir.html

In Vivek Agnihotri’s recent film, The Kashmir Files, frenzied crowds of Muslims chant Raliv, galiv, chaliv! (Convert, leave, or die!) as Hindu Pandit families cower in their homes. Bands of Islamic militants gun down security personnel and walk into Pandit homes to loot, rape, and murder. Wearing Indian army uniforms, they walk into Pandit villages and refugee camps, trick the residents by saying they must move to a safer location, then line them up and shoot them.

The film is set in Kashmir in the early 1990s. By then, the Pandits had long been reduced to a minority—about 140,000, or three percent of the population—in the beautiful Kashmir valley, their homeland since at least the fourth century BCE. Since the late 1980s, Islamic militancy, in the guise of a freedom (Azadi), movement gained momentum. As Pakistan-backed militants unleashed a campaign of mass murder, rape, and gory atrocities such as sawing a woman alive, nearly 100,000 Pandits were forced to flee. Agnihotri composes some of the shocking events of that exodus into a unified story that has left audiences in India gasping—and angry that a compromised media never gave this ethnic cleansing due coverage.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Ensuring Election Integrity by Lawrence Kadish

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18403/ensuring-election-integrity

Congratulations to Alabama and Ballotpedia for their invaluable role in protecting our democracy.

In the age of Covid, with absentee voting now widespread, only one state, Alabama, has safeguards that “explicitly allowed only the voters to return their ballot”, to prevent third parties and ballot harvesters from making your vote disappear.

If you are unable to vote in person, or if you decide to vote with an absentee ballot, mail your ballot in a sealed envelope to your local Board of Elections Office (Absentee Vote Dept) — and please mail it yourself.

In the State of Alabama, they have figured out how to keep your vote from being stolen when a “ballot bandit” knocks on your door. Ballot harvesting has been defined as “the practice in which political operatives collect absentee ballots from voters’ homes and drop them off at a polling place or election office.” It might sound harmless, even “helpful,” but unfortunately it has been subject to vast abuse. So if there is a knock on your door by unlicensed vote harvesters, shut and bolt the door and grab your copy of the Constitution.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ketanji-Brown-Jackson & Dave Aronberg & Jeffrey Epstein

By on April 8th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/08/ketanji-brown-jackson-dave-aronberg-and-jeffrey-epstein/

Federal election records show newly anointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has given money to just two politicians, both Democrats: Barack Obama and Dave Aronberg.

But who is Aronberg? He is a high school friend of Jackson from Florida, who, like her, has been accused of being soft on child sex offenders. The two were also classmates at Harvard Law School. Her financial gift to him is yet another data point indicating she is strangely not happy with laws protecting kids from sexual predators. With the Senate Thursday voting to confirm her 53-47, she is now in a lifetime position to review the constitutionality of those laws.

In 2009, Jackson donated $250 to Aronberg, then a Democratic Florida state senator (she contributed $400 to Obama the previous year, records show). At the time, Aronberg had been in the news for pushing a controversial bill to cut in half the distance registered sex offenders are required to live from schools, daycare centers, parks and other places kids congregate.

Jackson complained about such laws while attending Harvard Law with Aronberg.

In 1996, the year they both graduated, Jackson wrote an 18-page brief in the Harvard Law Review arguing that the judicial system was unfair to people who sexually prey on children, because it sentences them to monitoring and treatment after prison, which she viewed as additional “punishment” masquerading as prevention.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Armando Simon: College Degrees are a Bubble and a Collapse is on the Way

By on April 8th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/08/college-degrees-are-a-bubble-and-a-collapse-is-on-the-way/

“Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.” — Mark Twain

In the field of economics, a “bubble” refers to something that is being absurdly increased in value, much more than its true worth. The classic examples are the tulip mania bubble and the South Seas bubble. One could even make the case the 1929 U.S. stock market was a bubble. The results of such bubbles are invariably disastrous.

College degrees are a bubble. Many, if not most, degrees being granted are geared to be circular, that is, they are required for an academic setting. There, college graduates can happily regurgitate what their former professors told them, who in turn, repeated what their professors told them, each academic at each level in the process feeling very intellectual and very original. The problem is that there is a limited number of institutions that employ people to work in those fields or teach in them. Some politicians are proposing to exacerbate the quandary by offering free tuition, with the slogan, “Everybody deserves [?] a college education.”

Third World countries are faced with a huge mass of college graduates who cannot find a job — any job. I do not exaggerate when I say that if one of those college graduates lands a job at a local MacDonald’s, that graduate feels lucky, indeed. As has been observed, this tends to radicalize the resentful, unemployed, graduates, since they feel they are owed a job and status simply due to having gone to a university.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

If the Hunter Biden Story Was ‘Irrelevant,’ Why Was It Censored?

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/if-the-hunter-biden-story-was-irrelevant-why-was-it-censored/

At the University of Chicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference this week — a “how to” discussion, apparently — the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum was asked about the use of the “disinformation” charge as a pretext for suppressing news. Specifically, the student was referring to the concerted effort by mass media, Big Tech, and government to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story to protect Joe Biden.“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant,” she responded. “I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation. . . . I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States.”

Someone might let the January 6 committee, which questioned Ivanka Trump for eight hours the other day, know that the actions of the president’s offspring are totally irrelevant. Applebaum believed questions about presidential kids were relevant during the Trump years. She shared dozens of them, and wrote her own piece about their alleged corruption. And when the Hunter story broke, Applebaum thought it relevant enough to note that the “amazing thing is that even the fraudulent claims about Hunter Biden are so much less bad than many genuine, fully-reported, well-known stories about Trump, his children and their business deals.”

My italics indicate a word that is a synonym of disinformation. That was Applebaum’s contention. Now that a Politico reporter, the Washington Post, and New York Times have all confirmed the veracity of the New York Post’s reporting (probably because that information is going to be revealed in some filing), suddenly the story is a mere distraction.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

To ‘Fix’ the ObamaCare ‘Family Glitch,’ Biden Politicizes the IRS The new regulation is a clear violation of the law. By Brian Blase

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacare-politicizes-irs-internal-revenue-service-affordable-care-act-subsidies-families-tax-code-healthcare-biden-obama-11649337661?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Obama visited the White House Tuesday to support his successor’s attempts to expand ObamaCare. The big news is that the Biden White House has succeeded in convincing the Internal Revenue Service to propose a rule that would illegally extend insurance subsidies to people who are ineligible for them.

Mr. Obama’s presence at the White House was ironic given that the IRS’s proposed policy reverses its decision from a decade ago, when he was president. At that time, the IRS believed it had to follow the law as written. The reversal shows that the enforcement of the tax code has become deeply politicized. Through this rule, if finalized, the IRS will expand ObamaCare subsidies by billions of dollars a year beyond what Congress authorized.

At issue is whether an employer’s offer to provide health insurance to an employee’s dependents disqualifies those dependents from ObamaCare subsidies. The 2010 law created large subsidies for plans in the new exchanges—so large that lawmakers worried the fiscal cost would be untenable. Mr. Obama insisted that ObamaCare cost less than $1 trillion in its first decade. To meet that demand, Congress limited subsidies to people without access to Medicaid or an affordable employer plan.

The trick was determining affordability. ObamaCare based affordability on the cost of coverage for the employee alone. Both he and his dependents offered coverage are ineligible for subsidies if his premium payment for self-only coverage exceeds 9.6% of income.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Questions the media need to start asking about Hunter Biden and his dad Will America’s left-leaning press start asking questions? Andrew Mccarthy

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/questions-media-hunter-biden-dad-andrew-mccarthy

At a 2020 debate, President Donald Trump tried to press his rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, on an intriguing financial transaction: $3.5 million invested in a fund controlled by Biden’s son. Though Hunter Biden is better known for drug addiction and overall instability than business acumen, Elena Baturina, the widow of Yuri Luzhkov, longtime mayor of Moscow and confidant of Vladimir Putin, for some reason saw wisdom in pouring Russian money into a Hunter venture. 

If Biden had been the Republican in the race, Trump would not have had to raise the question. The media would already have been asking it incessantly. The animating question of the campaign would have been why, when President Barack Obama made his vice president the point-man on administration policy regarding such countries as Russia, Ukraine, and China, people connected to those notoriously corrupt regimes suddenly thought it expedient to pay Biden’s ne’er-do-well son millions upon millions of dollars.

But Biden was the Democrat in the race. The media-Democrat complex, far from haranguing him until he answered such questions, was sure to help him deflect. In fact, an establishment-friendly assortment of former intelligence officials baselessly floated the notion that damning data on a computer that patently belonged to Hunter might be Russian disinformation. The press dutifully ran with it. 

So, in response to Trump, Biden parroted the disinformation dodge, dismissed his opponent as a “clown,” and posed as if the Hunter questions were not worth dignifying with answers.

The tables have turned.

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