Warmists lynching an innocent bystander, CO2 By Viv Forbes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/warmists_lynching_an_innocent_bystander_co2.html

I live in SE Queensland. Yesterday the surface air temperature rose from a frosty 36ºF at sunrise to a balmy 72ºF in mid-afternoon. The enormous heat needed to achieve this 36º of warming came via radiation from the sun. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no significant part in this daily heating event – in fact it may intercept a tiny proportion of the incoming solar radiation and re-radiate it in all directions, thus keeping the daytime surface temperature a tiny bit cooler than it would have been otherwise.

At the deep Mount Isa Mine in NW Queensland, the surface temperature may average about 77ºF but it increases by about 20ºF every 50 meters of depth – rock walls are red hot in places. The enormous heat causing this comes via conduction from Earth’s geothermal heat plus some oxidation and heating of the sulphide ores as they come in contact with natural air containing oxygen. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no part in this heating.
There are volcanic windows open right now in Hawaii, Japan and the Galapagos revealing the vast resources of volcanic geothermal heat which is always migrating towards the cooler surface, sometimes violently.

Temperatures vary greatly over Earth’s surface, making a mockery of attempts to calculate an “average” for the globe. Air surface temperature may be minus -22ºF at the South Pole, while at the same time it can be plus 86ºF at the Equator. This enormous difference is caused by the varying intensity of solar radiation striking the surface – carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no significant part in creating this variance.
Surface air temperatures in big cities can be 9ºF hotter than surrounding rural land partly because bitumen roads, roofs and runways heat up more than grassy or forested countryside. Mega-cities are also full of heat-producing humans, engines, trains, vehicles, air conditioners, heaters, stoves, fridges, pumps and mowers.

Urban heat also comes from the warm bodies and hot exhalations from millions of humans digesting carbon-based foods, from stored chemical energy from burning hydro-carbons (wood, lignite, coal, oil and gas) or from nuclear power. Using green energy also adds to urban heat. Wind towers and solar panels extract energy from wind and sun in the countryside and release it where most of the electricity is used, usually in cities and suburbs. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no measurable part in producing these islands of urban heat.

The Ties That Bind: Russia, Iran, Hezbollah By Herbert London

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/11/ties-bind-russia-iran-and-hezbollah-but-theyre-rip/
Syria has become the “sick man” of the Middle East, a territory laden with death and homelessness. In 2014 erstwhile president Barak Obama invited the Russians into the region to control the use of poison gas by their surrogate Bashar Assad. In 2015, as the Russians intervention expanded President Obama said this “is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire.” Senator McCain responded on the Senate floor that the policy of the Obama administration “replaced the risk of action with the perils of inaction.”

Today we can see the perils of inaction unfold. Russia is dominant over nearly half of Syria, within only a few months of the intervention, Russian presence had put an end to any serious attempt by backers of the rebels to topple the Assad regime.

Moreover, Russian leaders reached an accord with Turkey which had attempted to destabilize the regime and instead reached an alliance based on its active hostility to the Kurds. It can now be asserted that with these alterations in policy, almost all those countries that once backed the opposition now depend on Russia to salvage the situation for them in Syria. It is by consent that Russia is the “strong horse of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The idea that Russia would serve as the balance wheel against Iran when it also maintains a tenuous alliance demonstrates the belief it is a better guarantor of stability than the United States. However, the Russians have not displayed consistency. Jordan, the U.S., Lebanon hoped that Russia would depart from its alliance with Iran and allow for a hopeful vision of the future. That has not yet emerged. But the State Department continues to believe Russia can be drawn away from its ties to Iran and Hezbollah. This initiative drives the present Russian-U.S. negotiation in the area.

Obama officials rushed to explain photos from 2014 that went viral showing locked-up immigrant children — and Trump’s facilities look the same

http://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5

Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children in cages went viral in May, and former Obama administration officials rushed to offer explanations.
The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had even shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump’s presidency.
The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government had been attempting to place with family members.
On June 17, reporters toured a similar government holding facility in McAllen, Texas, where migrant families are separated from one another and held in cages.

Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets last month to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.

The images, which the Associated Press first published in 2014, resurfaced recently for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.

The Migrant Question Western nations are fracturing on the issue. Theodore Dalrymple

https://www.city-journal.org/html/migrant-question-15980.html

Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government—anxious to prove its credentials—refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government—equally anxious to do the same—accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.

This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.

The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?

Sea Change by Mark Steyn on Europe

https://www.steynonline.com/8700/sea-change

When every last Trudeau eyebrow has been scraped off the floor of the Manoir Richelieu, it’s worth remembering that the divisions in the G7 are not quite as straightforward as the media would have us believe. For one thing, it’s not G6 vs Trump; there’s another disrupter in town:

Just met the new Prime Minister of Italy, @GiuseppeConteIT, a really great guy. He will be honored in Washington, at the @WhiteHouse, shortly.

Signor Conte heads what would once have been regarded as a pantomime-horse coalition of two rear ends: the left-wing Five Star Movement (M5S) and the right-wing Northern League (Lega). The so-called GroKo – the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat “Große Koalition” that governed Germany for most of the last thirteen years – was regarded as an alliance of all the prudent, sensible, mainstream persons, the kind who think nothing of admitting one-and-a-half million poorly educated, largely unemployable, demographically transformative young Muslim men into a country and then wondering why the gang-rape statistics are through the roof. By contrast, the Italian government is a coalition of the non-prudent non-sensible non-mainstream – the “alt-left” and the “far-right”. So how can that possibly work?

Well, we’re about to find out. In the two weeks he’s been in office, the new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini (leader of the Lega) has talked non-stop about migrants and his plans to deport over half-a-million of them: “The good times for illegals are over,” he declares confidently. “Get ready to pack your bags.” On election day, his party won 17 per cent of the vote; after a fortnight of deportation talk, he’s up to 27 per cent. Having talked the talk, he’s now walking the walk: For the first time since the “humanitarian crisis” began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.

TOMMY ROBINSON’S LETTER FROM PRISON AUDIO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3VPWzSXQQg

Daryl McCann The Great Bohemian Cultural Revolution

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/great-bohemian-cultural-revolution-enemies/

The proselytisation of postmodernist theory, according to Jordan Peterson, is less an emancipatory project than intellectual charlatanry and the relinquishment of individual responsibility. If a truth is validated by its teller’s enemies, the Canadian academic is right on the money.

Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos contains the kind of advice the parents and teachers of Baby Boomers were keen to impart to us all those years ago, advice that we weren’t so keen to hear: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (Rule 1), “Make friends with people who want the best for you” (Rule 3), “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world” (Rule 6), “Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie” (Rule 8), “Be precise in your speech” (Rule 10), and so on. They all sound like the message of some black-and-white television comedy from the 1950s. 12 Rules for Life, by my reckoning, is about seventy years too late.

It was one-time Quadrant editor Roger Sandall who, in The Culture Cult (2000), characterised the modern-day Left as less Marxian than bohemian. The 1960s social revolution was not so much against the bourgeoisie who owned and controlled the means of production as against bourgeois or Christian mores, which we might define as anything from traditional morality and workaday sobriety to enlightened patriotism. Everything, in other words, the Beatles and their acolytes circa 1963–69 wanted to discard. Sandall put it this way:

… it is certainly true that bohemianism is more deeply hostile to the values of the bourgeoisie than Marxism ever was. To understand why this is so, remember Ben Franklin’s useful virtues—temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, chastity and humility. Some of these values are compatible with social democracy. One or two of them found a place in the Communist world. But none are compatible with bohemia.

Peterson self-identifies as a British-style classical liberal, and yet so much of what he writes and says are the contemplations of an anti-bohemian conservative:

Because children, like other human beings, are not only good, they cannot simply be left to their own devices, untouched by society and bloom into perfection … This means they are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined and properly encouraged. This means that it is not just wrong to attribute all the violent tendencies of human beings to the pathologies of social structure. It’s wrong enough to be entirely backward.

The reader encounters an entreaty on Franklin’s useful vir

Socialist Protesters Chase Kirstjen Nielsen Out of D.C. Restaurant By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/socialist-protestors-chase-kirstjen-nielsen-out-of-d-c-restaurant/

Protesters affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) interrupted Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen while she was eating at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C. Tuesday night.

The protesters, who reportedly arrived after receiving a tip that Nielsen was eating at the restaurant, gathered around her table and began chanting “Abolish ICE,” “Shame,” and “End Texas concentration camps!”

A member of the Washington, D.C. chapter of DSA later explained that the protest was prompted by Nielsen’s defense of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration-enforcement policy, which has thus far resulted in the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents, who are being detained while awaiting prosecution for crossing the border illegally.

Nielsen emerged as the face of the “zero tolerance” policy Monday, defending the approach as the unfortunate product of legislative inaction, and calling on Congress to pass an immigration-reform bill that provides a solution to end family separations.

Professor: Learning Math Can Cause ‘Collateral Damage’ to Society By Katherine Timpf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/math-can-cause-collateral-damage-to-society-professor/Some things in life are objective and rational, and that’s perfectly okay.

According to a new textbook written by a professor at the University of Exeter, learning mathematics can cause “collateral damage” to society because it “provides a training in ethics-free thought.”

“Reasoning without meanings provides a training in ethics-free thought,” Paul Ernest writes in “The Ethics of Mathematics: Is Mathematics Harmful?” — a chapter of his book The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today.

In an abstract for the book, Ernest claims that although he does “acknowledge that mathematics is a widespread force for good,” “there is significant collateral damage caused by learning mathematics.”

According to Ernest, this “collateral damage” happens in three ways. First, he argues, the styles of thinking involved with mathematics are “detached” and “calculated” ones, which value “rules, abstraction, objectification, impersonality, unfeelingness, dispassionate reason, and analysis” — which he claims “can be damaging when applied beyond mathematics to social and human issues.”

The second problem, he explains, is that “the applications of mathematics in society can be deleterious to our humanity unless very carefully monitored and checked.”

“Money and thus mathematics is the tool for the distribution of wealth,” he writes. “It can therefore be argued that as the key underpinning conceptual tool mathematics is implicated in the global disparities in wealth.”

Finally, Ernest claims, “the personal impact of learning mathematics on learners’ thinking and life chances can be negative for a minority of less successful students, as well as potentially harmful for successful students.” Ernest continues to explain that math is often viewed as “masculine,” and that that can essentially make it difficult for women to deal with learning it.

The Humanities are Dying, Poisoned by the Faculty By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/humanities-education-harmed-by-faculty/

Fewer and fewer students choose to study the humanities these days and the main reason is that the field has been overrun by “progressive” notions. Those notions, of course, were introduced and spread by the faculty, eager to create lots of dedicated revolutionaries.

In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Mark Bauerlein examines the sad illness afflicting the humanities. Specifically, he looks at a recent statement put out jointly by the Association of American University Professors and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “The incapacity of the experts and professionals who wrote the statement to understand why their own diminishment has happened is abundantly in evidence,” he writes.

The learned folks who wrote the statement are utterly blind to their own role in the decline of this once-grand field of study.

This paragraph of Bauerlein’s nails the problem exactly:

Today’s liberal arts professors have a different relationship to their subjects. Joy, wonder, awe, and inspiration are missing. The professors aren’t merely uncomfortable with Paradise Lost and Parsifal. They vigorously point out the sexism and racism of those works. But they even denounce earlier practitioners in their own fields, too, the New Critics, for instance, for their backward notions. We were told that opening the canon to women and persons of color was a positive and happy development, but that was only part of the project. The professors also had to denigrate the tradition, a turn proven by the dismissive label ‘Dead White Males.’ They got rid of the honorific term civilization and replaced it with culture, and then with cultures, which, they believed, eliminates the implication of the old term that some societies are civilized and others are savage.