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August 2023

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Brainwashing Hammering K-12 school children nonstop about the dangers of climate change in every class – even math, art and gym. by Betsy McCaughey

By on August 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-brainwashing/

Hammering K-12 school children nonstop about the dangers of climate change in every class, even math, art and gym, is child abuse.

Barely one-third of fourth graders can read or do math at grade level, according to the latest national scores, but climate activists are demanding kids hear about global warming in every class. New Jersey mandates it, and now Connecticut is following suit as the school year opens. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams is requiring every public school participate in Climate Action Day.

The climate push is nakedly political, spearheaded in New Jersey by the governor’s wife, first lady Tammy Murphy, a founding member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. Lessons link urban heat islands to tree placement inequities, redlining and racism.

New York City holds out activist Greta Thunberg as a climate hero and role model, telling kids to “get involved in the global student climate action movement” and “get to know community leaders and register to vote.” Everything short of pre-enrolling kindergarteners in the Democratic Party. Parents should be outraged.

Climate change is the Left’s religion. The messaging is as heavy-handed as catechism in a religious school.

It’s also scary. Children are being told that global warming is killing their favorite animals. At Slackwood Elementary School in New Jersey, first graders are taught that transportation, heating, and raising livestock are “making Earth feel unwell.”

The reality is that these children are too young to comprehend the trade-offs of moving to zero carbon immediately. A first grader doesn’t know Mommy can’t afford an electric vehicle — average price $53,000.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Rewrites the History of Covid School Closings The President takes credit for reopening he did nothing to help.

By on August 29th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-school-closings-covid-teachers-union-eliot-hine-middle-school-8e29f10e?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden welcomed students at Eliot-Hine Middle School in Washington, D.C., back to class on Monday. He also gave them a lesson in irony as he lamented pandemic learning loss caused by his teachers union allies.

“The hardest thing is to come back after three months of not doing any work, not doing any homework, and all of a sudden you got a lot to make—everybody has a lot to catch up on from the end of the last year,” Mr. Biden told students. Imagine how much harder it is for them to catch up after “learning”—i.e., staring at screens—at home for a year.

Perhaps sensing parents’ continued anger over the Covid school shutdowns, the Administration is trying to claim credit for reopening them. “When President Biden took office, less than half of K-12 students were going to school in person,” the White House said. “Today, thanks to the President’s swift actions and historic investments, every school in America is open safely for in-person instruction.”

What an achievement—three and a half years after the start of the pandemic, all schools are open. The Administration omits that its own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took dictation from union chief Randi Weingarten for its reopening guidelines. Those guidelines gave unions in urban school districts like Chicago cover to delay the return to full in-person learning.

Schools would have opened much sooner had Mr. Biden used his bully pulpit and leveraged federal money. The Administration could have conditioned the nearly $200 billion in Covid funds that Congress appropriated for schools on their reopening. Instead, schools were showered with more money than they could usefully spend.

Many went on hiring sprees. According to the Administration, the number of public school social workers and nurses have increased by 39% and 30%, respectively, from before the pandemic. Students don’t seem to be benefiting. The share of students reporting five or more days of missed school in the last month has doubled since 2020.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Hurricane Season Means A Surge In Category 5 Climate Lies 

By on August 29th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/29/hurricane-season-means-a-surge-in-category-5-climate-lies/

We’re about half way through the 2023 hurricane season, predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters to be a near-normal year, and it’s been rather quiet. But with a few storms brewing this week in the Atlantic, we expect to hear the usual shrieking from politicians, activists and the media, blaming the weather on man-caused climate change. Our suggestion is to pay no attention to the eco-screamers’ lamentations.

On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center issued advisories for a hurricane and a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean, and an advisory for a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific. Of the three, the Atlantic storm Idalia seems to be the most dangerous. It could make landfall as a hurricane on the Gulf coast of Florida on Wednesday.

That could mean a life-changing disaster for thousands of Floridians. The climatistas, though, see opportunity in crisis. They never let a serious calamity go to waste. Before the weekend was over, the press was linking Idalia to “climate change,” which is of course code for “man-made global warming,” as if there had never been a hurricane before humans began burning fossil fuels.

The alarmist community has long insisted that weather is not the same as climate any time anyone ever pointed to mild summers and colder-than-usual winters as evidence that the global warming theory was bunk. But when it’s convenient for spreading fear, the same crowd takes isolated weather events and claims they are evidence that human activity is warming the planet.

Even in 2023, truth is still important to some of us, and the facts show that the global warming zealots are false prophets. Inconvenient to their con are data that show that death and destruction from climate-related disasters have fallen sharply over the last century. Annual fatalities from floods, droughts, wildfires, storms, and extreme temperatures have tumbled by nearly 98% over that era, from nearly 500,000 in the early 1920s to fewer than 12,000 in 2022. The details don’t fit the narrative, but when did that ever matter to the political left that continues to feed the fiction that man is setting his planet on fire?

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Nick Cohen: A woke witch hunt has taken over the arts

By on August 29th, 2023

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-woke-witch-hunt-has-taken-over-the-arts/

Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful. But perhaps we should refrain from being too pleased with ourselves.

Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes. Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s or China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear can still run through the arts, publishing and the liberal press. And, as in true autocracies, the price of speaking out can still mean losing your job and any chance of alternative work in your chosen field.

The accusation that Greig had endorsed an unorthodox opinion was enough to send him into frantic efforts to save his career

So commonplace are the symptoms of fear we barely register them now. A few days ago, to quote an example that got next to no publicity, an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ called Rosie Aspinall Priest took it upon herself to go through the social media of David Greig, a Scottish playwright and theatre director, as if this were an entirely normal way to behave – in the arts today I am afraid to say it is.

Her snooping paid off. She announced that Greig was guilty of ‘openly liking transphobic tweets’: a career-destroying offence, as she must have known. But how transphobic did they need to be to finish Greig off?

One tweet Greig liked referred to ‘gender madness’, a sackable offence, apparently. A second contrasted the police’s cruel arrest of an autistic girl, who had said that one of their officers looked like her ‘lesbian nana’, with the cops’ light handling of a transgender activist who allegedly punched a gender-critical feminist in the face.  

So you can be sure I am not misreading this, here is the tweet Greig liked in full. He was damned for endorsing the sentiment that ‘if you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned’. And that was it. 

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