The Hardware Store Proves We’ll Never Erase The Sexes From Our Language By J.C. Bourque

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/18/the-hardware-store-proves-well-never-erase-the-sexes-from-our-language/

You see, I needed a self-centering hole locator to finish a rim joist on the deck we were building, and a pipe nipple, ballcock, and pipe dope for some plumbing repairs. I also needed to buttress a groin vault.

“I think my gender changer is lost in the mail.”

My wife looked at me with a face I had never seen in our 19 years together.

“Is there something we need to talk about?”

I had discovered that my autocorrect (a misnamed item if there ever was one) had screwed up the “ship to” address on an online order from an electronics supply house. I’d ordered a DB37 parallel cable adapter to change a male connector to a female one for a project I was working on. It’s called a gender changer.

“It’s for that electronics project at work. It’s called a gender changer,” I explained, redundantly.

“Well, it sounds pretty creepy. Haven’t we heard enough about this stuff in the news?” she replied, paying more attention to her iPad than our conversation.

“You don’t understand,” I mansplained in my best Cliff Clavin. “The DB37 connectors come in two types: female and male. The male connectors have pointy things that go into little holes in the female connectors. If you try to mate two males or two females, you won’t get a — er, connection. This is my dilemma at work. I have two males that need to — um, mate.”

Actually, I already have a DB37 male-to-female gender changer, but I couldn’t make it work no matter what I tried. Turns out it identifies as a DB25 female-to-male. I even tried affirming its feelings, but to no avail.

“Two males can’t mate,” she added. “Everyone knows that. Why are you talking about this weirdness? Are you going Caitlyn on me?”

It occurred to me that her offer to pick up some things for me at the hardware store later that day might be problematic. You see, I needed a self-centering hole locator to finish a rim joist on the deck we were building, and a pipe nipple, ballcock, and pipe dope for some plumbing repairs. I also needed to buttress a groin vault. I could imagine this was going to get ugly.

Just recently, I learned the Purdue Online Writing Lab is discouraging the use of “man” in words such as mailman (even if your mail carrier also carries a Y chromosome), mankind, and man-made. Assemblyman, sportsman, anchorman, and other terms that might refer to a person of either sex or any gender should be laundered to become gender neutral.

Let’s Stop Pretending Every Impeachment Witness Is A Selfless Hero By John Daniel Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/18/lets-stop-pretending-every-impeachment-witness-is-a-selfless-hero/

It’s become clear that some witnesses in the impeachment probe have their own agenda, and not all of them are courageous martyrs for the truth.

Throughout this impeachment charade we’ve been told by the media and House Democrats that a cadre of unelected career bureaucrats in the State Department and the National Security Council who are cooperating with the impeachment inquiry are heroes, patriots, and paragons of virtue and self-sacrifice for defying President Trump and proclaiming the truth about Trump corruption and self-dealing in Ukraine.

Last week, the media portrayed former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as a courageous martyr recalled from her post by Trump for no reason and then viciously attacked by him on Twitter while she was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee. Trump’s attack was immediately characterized as “witness intimidation” by House Democrats and the media, who played up the notion that Yovanovitch was a victim being punished for nothing more than her commitment to the truth.

We heard the same sort of praise for William Taylor and George Kent, the State Department officials who also testified last week, just as we’ve heard praise for all the career bureaucrats who have testified in closed-door sessions so far. Democrats and the media gave special praise to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the NSC Ukraine expert who told impeachment investigators he was alarmed by what he heard on the July 25 phone call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. As one of the only officials to have heard the call first-hand, Vindman was immediately hailed as a “star” witness in the impeachment probe, treated to glowing profiles in the New York Timesand the Washington Post, which said the Soviet émigré escaped to America with his family as a small child and grew up “determined to be as American as can be.”

Anti-US Islamic terrorism – the Jefferson legacy Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2Xdyp1z

Iran’s Ayatollahs and their subordinates, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, represent the wave of Islamic terrorism, which has plagued the Middle East – primarily Muslim societies – since the 7th century, surging into Europe, Asia, Africa, South, Central and North America. 

In fact, most Muslim regimes have risen to power – or lost it – through violence, subversion and terrorism, as recently demonstrated by the Arab Tsunami and the civil wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.  Moreover, three of the first four Caliphs, who succeeded Muhammad, were murdered: Umar ibn Abd al-Kahttab (644 AD), Uthman ibn Affan (656 AD) and Ali ibn Abu Talib (661 AD).

Anti-US Islamic terrorism has been an integral feature of US history since 1776, as presented by the following US personalities, who were unrestrained by 2019 political correctness.

For example, in 1786, Presidents-to-be John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, then US Ambassadors to Britain and France, reported to Congress a message from the representative of the Tripoli’s Barbary Muslim pirates, which articulated the reason for Muslim hostility towards the US: “[Islam] was founded on the laws of the Prophet, as written in the Quran. All nations which had not acknowledged [Islam’s] authority were sinners. It was [the Muslims’] right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave them. Every Muslim slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. A commission paid [by the US] would secure some temporary lenience….” During 1801-1805, President Jefferson deployed the US Navy and Marines to Tripoli, defeating the Muslim pirates and freeing all US slaves.

Biden v. Trump: Which One Is The “Bribe”? Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-16-the-trump-impeachment-what-is-the-crime-2

It was right around the time that I was writing my last post (“The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?”) that House Democrats started using the word “bribery” to describe what they are looking into. OK, that’s a start. Shall we consider it further?

Bribery is a real crime, and it’s even mentioned in the Constitution as a basis for impeachment. But there are two major problems with trying to fit the square peg of the Trump/Ukraine fact pattern into the round hole of the impeachable crime of “bribery.” The first is that if providing to a politician some intangible political advantage can be characterized as a “bribe,” then most of what politicians do all day would become “bribery.” The second is that calling President Trump’s conduct as to Ukraine “bribery” invites comparison with the conduct of Joe and Hunter Biden in the same country, and calls for testing the conduct of each against the words of the applicable statute to see which is the better fit.

As discussed in the previous post, it’s only a “crime” if you can fit within the exact words of some criminal statute passed by Congress. In the case of the crime of bribery of a federal official, the main statute is 18 U.S.C. Section 201(b). Here are the words of the relevant portion:

(b) Whoever . . . (2) being a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act . . . shall be fined under this title . . . or imprisoned for not more than fifteen years, or both.

170 Years of Earth Surface Temperature Data Show No Evidence of Significant Warming Charles Rotter

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/11/14/170-years-of-earth-surface-temperature-data-show-no-evidence-of-significant-warming/

Author: Thomas K. Bjorklund, University of Houston, Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Key Points

1. From 1850 to the present, the noise-corrected, average warming of the surface of the earth is less than 0.07 degrees C per decade.

2. The rate of warming of the surface of the earth does not correlate with the rate of increase of fossil fuel emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere.

3. Recent increases in surface temperatures reflect 40 years of increasing intensities of the El Nino Southern Oscillation climate pattern.

Abstract

This study investigates the relationships between surface temperatures from 1850 to the present and reported long-range temperature predictions of global warming. A crucial component of this analysis is the calculation of an estimate of the warming curve of the surface of the earth. The calculation removes errors in temperature measurements and fluctuations due to short-duration weather events from the recorded data. The results show the average rate of warming of the surface of earth for the past 170 years is less than 0.07 degrees C per decade. The rate of warming of the surface of the earth does not correlate with the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The perceived threat of excessive future global temperatures may stem from misinterpretation of 40 years of increasing intensities of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern in the eastern Pacific Ocean. ENSO activity culminated in 2016 with the highest surface temperature anomaly ever recorded. The rate of warming of the earth’s surface has dropped 41 percent since 2006.

Caltech recently announced the start of a 5-year project with several other research centers to build a new climate model “from the ground up” (Perkins, R. 2018). During these five years, the world’s understanding of the causes of climate change should be greatly improved.

The scientific goal must be to narrow the range of uncertainty of predictions with better data and better models until human intervention makes sense. We have the time to get it right. A rational environmental protection program and a vibrant economy can co-exist. The challenge is to allow scientists the time and freedom to work without interference from special interests.

What If They Gave an Impeachment and Nobody Came? Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/11/18/what-if-they-gave-an-impeachment-and-nobody-came-n2556617?

So, while that human troll doll of an ambassador was back east dancing for Adam Schiff’s pleasure and I was out in a glitzy blue Los Angeles-area city at a nice restaurant to score some munchables and people were talking and chatting and interacting and how many were talking about impeachment? 

Here’s a hint: It’s the same number as the average dates per decade for a Weekly Standard writer. 

Just kidding – there is no such thing as a writer for the Weekly Standard because it destroyed itself by sucking.

The number is “Zero.”Nil.Nada. 

Even less than the amount of Indian in Chef Sitting Bolshevik’s DNA.

No one cares.

Well, not no one. People in Washington care. After all, Donald Trump’s real crime is not deferring to the same D.C. geniuses who were so relentlessly awful that they caused us to elect Donald Trump in the first place. The meme is going around that “I hired Donald Trump to fire people like you,” and boy – is it ever on point. That the president – yeah, he’s our president and he’s going to keep being our president for five more long years – refuses to submit to the bureaucrats of the ruling caste on foreign policy is not a bug. It’s a feature – the feature that closed the sale.

See, our ruling class is utter garbage, as the televised circus on the Potomac proved. But no one goes to circuses anymore.

What is the name of the person who watched Adam Schiff’s festival of political onanism and said, “Why yes, these startling revelations that a bunch of over-credentialed glorified DMV clerks heard from their pal who heard from another pal who heard from his manicurist that Donald Trump wanted to investigate Hoover Biden, the Tony Montana of cheesy nepo-graft, over his $50K+ a month bribe, has made me want to undo the election.”

Obama Granted Clemency to Terrorists and Traitors, But We’re Supposed to Be Angry at Trump’s Pardons By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-granted-clemency-to-terrorists-and-traitors-but-were-supposed-to-be-angry-at-trumps/

Last week, President Trump granted full pardons for Army First Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who’d been accused of war crimes. Lorance had served six years of a 19-year sentence, and Golsteyn was facing trial for killing an alleged Taliban bombmaker. Navy SEAL Edward R. Gallagher, who was found not guilty of war crimes, but still had his rank reduced, was granted clemency and restoration of rank.

Lawmakers had been pushing for pardons for Lorance and Golsteyn because they’d taken actions to defend themselves on the battlefield and were charged with war crimes for it.  Yet, when President Trump pardoned them, it immediately sparked controversy and outrage. Pete Buttigieg joined in the outrage chorus, claiming Trump “dishonored our armed services.”

Drive-By Media Cash In on Impeachment Hysteria . By Frank Miele

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/18/drive by_media_cash_in_on_impeachment_hysteria_141751.html

An unhappy coincidence Thursday morning was, for me, the perfect metaphor for the mass (media) hysteria engendered by the televised impeachment hearings the nation was burdened with last week.

Although Chairman Adam Schiff had only scheduled hearings before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday and Friday, the programming department at CNN apparently decided to maximize their ratings by touting “Special Coverage” of the impeachment on Thursday as well. At least, that was the message that had been sent to YouTube TV, whose channel guide promoted “Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage” on CNN from early morning till mid-afternoon on Thursday.

No doubt, the hosts at CNN (under the tutelage of Never Trump boss Jeff Zucker) were prepared to give their last full measure of devotion to a cause that was conceived in hatred, and dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump is unworthy of the presidency and must be impeached, so help us God.

But on that Thursday morning, a true tragedy intervened in the form of a mass shooting at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif. Therefore, for YouTube TV viewers at least, we were treated to the spectacle of CNN circling the shooting scene like carrion-hunting vultures under the banner of “Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage.”

The shooting, and more particularly CNN’s fascination with it, reminded us (if we needed reminding) that cable news is built on a business plan of sensationalism, shock and outrage. It also resulted in a palimpsest of comments by CNN host Anderson Cooper and others that were equally applicable to the shooting and to the impeachment coverage that it had replaced.

“There is a numbness to this, I think, in some orders” — quarters? — “as well,” Cooper intoned solemnly. “It’s a horrific numbness of people looking up at a TV screen, seeing this yet again, and it just seems like it goes on and on and on.”

He was talking about the school shooting, and yet his words could just as easily have been about the reaction that many voters have to the latest incarnation of a Democratic impeachment push that has been underway literally since the day after the 2016 election.

Now, we must be careful not to compare the actual tragedy of an act of violence such as a school shooting with the potential destruction of the civil order through an act of political sabotage. They have nothing in common except that both are fodder for our rubber-necking news media, and that is the warning I want to impart.

We already know from the Project Veritas undercover investigation of CNN that the news channel’s president, Jeff Zucker, has a blatant anti-Trump bias, which he has passed on to his employees.

In recordings of daily phone calls captured by the Project Veritas whistleblower, Zucker directed staffers to push the impeachment narrative above all else.

MY SAY: THE PROFITS OF DOOM

My mailbox is full of late year requests for donations from organizations, institutions, publications, the arts and politicians.

 Warning about the growing epidemic of Anti-Semitism is always good when mining the pockets of donors. Take the Anti Defamation League whose avowed purpose is: : “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Hate-The mission of the ADL is to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

So, given this lofty purpose how is it that the ADL, in 2017 published an excellent overview on the outsize antisemitic violence, hatred, sermons and school lectures in Moslem nations, and has now simply air-brushed it?

See and hear Charles Jacobs in this video explain it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=255&v=jVqqPx-Cq8k&feature=emb

The Wages of Trump Fixation The strange case of a reborn Max Boot and the folly of impeachment. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/17/the-wages-of-trump-fixation/

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

No one should know better the horrific crimes of a mass-murdering Josef Stalin than the Russian-born Boot. Stalin’s purges, orchestrated famines, gulags, show trials, liquidation of the officer class, and atrocities during World War II perhaps accounted for over 20 million Russian deaths. So how could Boot write, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump”? Twenty million dead souls don’t quite match Boot’s hatred of Trump.

After the former Republican Boot saw Trump elected, by defeating his own particular favored Republican primary candidate, and Hillary Clinton, he seemed a bit embittered: “For the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party.”