BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Tyranny of Virtue Salvatore Babones

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-tyranny-of-virtue/

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders lauding the Swedish welfare state or Donald Trump demanding the release of an American rapper from a Swedish jail, Americans are fascinated by the Scandinavian home of dancing queens and flat-pack furniture, where sexual liberation seems to have been sublimated into a Freudian fixation on political correctness.

In PC Worlds the American anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, who is married to a Swede and formerly taught in Sweden, offers a rare tour of the “opinion corridors” of the Swedish intellectual elite in this morally compelling but unevenly written indictment of political correctness. Sweden, it turns out, is obsessed with proving its politically correct anti-racism, even to the point of unravelling its once close-knit cities in the cause of multicultural accommodation and closing its eyes to serious crimes ranging from car burning to gang rape, as long as they happen to have been committed by recent immigrants. In Friedman’s telling, Swedish intellectuals are so fixated on demonstrating their anti-racist credentials that perhaps the only plausible explanation is that they are trying to make up for their own deeply held, but publicly inadmissible, racist leanings. In short, he thinks they doth protest too much.

Some of what Friedman criticises as political correctness might pass these days for simple good manners: whatever your politics, blasphemy cartoons and ethnic put-downs are not very nice, even if liberals rightly abhor their prohibition. But today’s Sweden shows how much can go wrong when political correctness is taken too seriously by those who charge themselves with enforcing it. Friedman reports incidents in which self-appointed anti-racist vigilantes make “house calls” on those who have the temerity to contradict the PC party line, vandalising their homes and terrorising their families. Less frightening but potentially more damaging, universities and newspapers have been pressured—sometimes successfully—to dismiss students and fire employees who make factually correct statements about ethnicity, immigration and crime that contradict officially-ordained PC myths.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Erdogan’s Campaign against the West by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15054/erdogan-campaign-against-west

“Europe is a cultural continent, not a geographical one… It is its culture that gives it a common identity. The roots that have formed it, that have permitted the formation of this continent, are those of Christianity. […] In this sense, throughout history Turkey has always represented another continent, in permanent contrast with Europe. There were the wars against the Byzantine empire, the fall of Constantinople, the Balkan wars, and the threat against Vienna and Austria. That is why I think it would be an error to equate the two continents.” — Pope Benedict XVI, Le Figaro Magazine, 2007.

In Germany, Turkey controls 900 mosques out of a total of 2,400. These Islamic centers not only serve members of the Turkish diaspora, but also stop them from assimilating into German society. Speaking with Turks in Germany, Erdogan urged them not to assimilate, and called the assimilation of migrants in Europe “a crime against humanity.”

Erdogan has also been expanding Turkey beyond its borders – starting with Cyprus, the Greek Islands, Suakin Island (Sudan) and Syria.

Mosques, migrants and the military are now Erdogan’s new weapons in his threats against the West.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “has earned the title of Caliph” according to Turkish journalist Abdurrahman Dilipak.

Erdogan is the head of NATO’s second-largest army; he has spies throughout Europe through a network of mosques, associations and cultural centers; he has brought his country to the top of the world rankings for the number of imprisoned journalists and has shut the mouth of German comedians with the threat of legal action. By keeping migrants in Turkish refugee camps, he controls immigration to Europe.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Who are these ‘11,000 Concerned Scientists’? By Casey Plunkett

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/who_are_these_11000_concerned_scientists.html

Academics and scientists are yet again issuing “consensus” statements on climate change.  In 2017, we were warned by 16,000 scientists across 184 countries that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.”  This past week, BioScience, an academic, peer-reviewed journal from Oxford University Press, found 11,224 scientists, from 153 countries, who signed off on the latest climate change drivel.  Citing a “moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is,” they’ve published the paper “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.”  In dystopian tone, they’ve issued a demand for Earth’s population to “be stabilized — and, ideally, gradually reduced — within a framework that ensures social integrity.”

With the disclaimer that I’m just a layman who resides in “flyover country,” who are these “11,000 Scientists,” and do they even have credibility to weigh in on this matter?  Scientists, with few exceptions, are subject matter experts in specific fields — their expertise isn’t inherently relevant and extensible across varying fields of science.  For example, a physicist won’t teach a graduate-level course in biology, a podiatrist won’t perform open heart surgery, and a botanist has minimal insight on quantum computing.  How many of these 11,000 scientists possess germane degrees in meteorology, climatology, or atmospheric science?  Lo and behold, BioScience actually published a list of these scientific signatories in the attached link — so I looked. 

In keyword searches across 324 pages of signing signatories, spanning 11,224 scientists, I found 240 (2%) individuals with professions that can be construed as bona fide meteorologists, climatologists, or atmospheric scientists. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California’s Blackouts: A Burning History, A Dark Present, A Dim Future If Nothing Changes Kerry Jackson

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/09/californias-blackouts-a-burning-history-a-dark-present-a-dim-future-if-nothing-changes/

Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire report, click here.

Early on the morning of November 8, 2018, electrical transmission lines in the Pulga area of Butte County owned by Pacific Gas and Electric started what became known as the Camp Fire.

“The tinder dry vegetation and Red Flag conditions consisting of strong winds, low humidity and warm temperatures promoted this fire and caused extreme rates of spread, rapidly burning into Pulga to the east and west into Concow, Paradise, Magalia and the outskirts of east Chico,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported in May 2019 after its investigation found PG&E at fault for the fire.

A second ignition site “determined to be vegetation into electrical distribution lines owned and operated by PG&E … was consumed by the original fire.”

The Camp Fire, possibly ignited by a faulty C-hook, burned through 153,336 acres, destroyed 18,804 structures, and killed 86 people. It was the most destructive and deadliest wildfire in California history, taking more than twice the number of lives as the next deadliest fire in the state, the Griffith Park fire of 1933, which killed 29.

PG&E, responsible for at least 1,500 fires since 2014, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2019, as it reportedly had “no choice … given the flood of lawsuits and wildfire liabilities it estimates could be up to $30 billion.” About six months later, it agreed to pay $1 billion in compensation to “more than a dozen California cities, counties and agencies for losses resulting from deadly wildfires sparked by its equipment.”

In September 2019, the utility agreed to pay an $11 billion insurance settlement to resolve insurance claims over the Camp Fire and the wine country fires of 2017. It’s possible prosecutors will eventually file criminal charges against the utility and its executives for their role in the fire.

Roughly one month later, PG&E began a series of “public safety power shutoffs” to reduce the risk of wildfires. “Given the continued and growing threat of extreme weather and wildfires, and as an additional precautionary measure following the 2017 and 2018 wildfires,” the utility announced, “we are expanding and enhancing our Community Wildfire Safety Program to further reduce wildfire risks and help keep our customers and the communities we serve safe.

“This includes expanding our Public Safety Power Shutoff program beginning with the 2019 wildfire season to include all electric lines that pass through high fire-threat areas — both distribution and transmission.” The power outages that began on the morning of October 9 caused roughly 2 million people to lose their power at its peak.

The blackouts continued throughout the month. By October 26, the power to roughly 2.8 million customers was being turned off in what was called “the state’s largest — and potentially longest — deliberate blackout ever.”

Two days later, the Los Angeles Times reported that “never before in California history have more than 2 million people gone five days without electrical power because of the intentional safety policy of a utility.” The blackouts continued throughout the month. By October 26, the power to roughly 2.8 million customers was being turned off.

PG&E began rolling blackouts the afternoon of Friday, October 25, “and by Sunday evening the utility had cut current to 940,000 homes and businesses, affecting more than 2 million people, with one more phase to come in Fresno and Madera counties.” Despite the public safety power shutoffs, the wildfires reached the point by October 27 that Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. It was effective across the entire state.

To continue reading, click here.

POLITICS Comments turned off

It’s Not Republicans Who Are Reluctant to Accept Political Outcomes They Don’t Like By David Harsanyi

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/its-not-republicans-who-are-reluctant-to-accept-political-outcomes-they-dont-like/

“Can Republicans relearn how to accept political outcomes they don’t like?” What in holy hell is the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman talking about? According to the piece, Matt Bevin’s (completely legal) request to re-canvass the Kentucky election portends an unwillingness by the GOP to accept the results the democratic process. Talk about projection.

We shouldn’t have to say more than “Stacey Abrams.” And it’s not just that the Democrat is a full-blown conspiracy theorist, it’s that leading members of her party enable her attacks on veracity of elections. Joe Biden claimed, without any evidence, that “voter suppression is the reason why Stacey Abrams isn’t governor right now.” Pete Buttigieg said suppression “racially motivated” in his remarks to the group that Abrams “ought to be governor.” And they’re not alone.

Abrams lost by 54,723 votes.

Waldman gives Abrams a pass for her recalcitrance, because, he notes, she “ended her campaign for governor of Georgia but pointedly refused to call it a ‘concession’ because, she said, it would grant the election, in which her opponent engaged in various forms of voter suppression, a legitimacy it did not deserve.” Well, yes, that’s the point, isn’t it? Everyone has a reason for why they don’t accept results. Democrats tend to rely on nebulous claims of “voter suppression.” But Abrams had legal avenues available to her, and they turned up nothing. Unlike Abrams, Bevin hasn’t argued that the results won’t be legitimate. “So why can’t they just let the process play itself out?”

Then again, Georgia’s gubernatorial election is a trivial sideshow compared to 2016 presidential race they’ve never accepted as legitimate. Less than two months ago, Hillary Clinton was still telling CBS News that “Trump knows he’s an illegitimate president.” Earlier this year, she claimed that, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.” Here you have the most widely known Democrat in the nation maintaining that the election was stolen from her. Putting your party above your country in this way is, as someone once noted, just “horrifying.”

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Rosenhan Study Was Bunk By John Hirschauer ******

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-rosenhan-study-was-bunk/

As Hilaire Belloc stated in an essay buried deep in 1941’s The Silence of the Sea, “Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.” One wonders just how many “deaths” have been caused by junk social science and bungled statistics. Consider:

David Rosenhan — Stanford professor of psychology, influential scholar, the rest — published his famous study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” in 1973. It came at the apex of the “first wave” of deinstitutionalization in the United States — John Kennedy’s last act as president was the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, a federal boondoggle which usurped state power and tried to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill via national mandate. He created a network of “community mental health centers” with federal funds, centers that he hoped would replace the state hospital as the locus of psychiatric care. The results were mixed; on one hand, plenty of individuals were mistreated in state hospitals, and still others never belonged there in the first place. Yet for the most seriously ill, the results were disastrous — the new “community mental health centers” Kennedy initiated had becomes hotbeds of political activism and had little time or interest for the violently disturbed. By 1973, many of those who were unnecessarily hospitalized in the past had already been discharged. But anti-institutional sentiment had reached a fever pitch among progressive academics; Mike Gorman, one of the architects of deinstitutionalization, admitted later in life that his “hidden agenda was to break the back of the state mental hospital.”

Rosenhan, caught in the spirit of revolution, instructed eight so-called “pseudo-patients” to play-act as schizophrenics and seek admission to mental hospitals. The subjects allegedly returned with a litany of horror stories — neglect, overmedication, squalor, uncaring staff — and Rosenhan further asserted that, if psychiatric professionals considered these fake patients insane when they were perfectly lucid, then the institutional psychiatry must itself be a sham. The study was cited time and again by activists eager to close “the asylums.” Today, with scores of drug-addled, mentally ill persons toiling on our streets, the fruits of this effort couldn’t be clearer.

Susannah Cahalan, author of the new book The Great Pretender, raises significant questions about Rosenhan’s study. She discovered, for instance, that one of the subjects contradicted the study’s findings outright — he told Cahalan that his experience at the institution was much different than Rosenhan let on. From her account in the New York Post:

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What Germany’s Foreign Minister Gets Wrong about the Berlin Wall By Jakub Grygiel

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/berlin-wall-europe-did-not-defeat-communism-by-itself/

‘Europe’ did not defeat Communism by itself.

Historical revisionism as an academic divertissement is corrupting, muddling the intellects of generations. For instance, ignoring or obscuring the fact that Soviet socialism (like its sister, National Socialism) was a murderous tool in the hands of large bureaucratic states run by thugs — and thus a target of popular opprobrium and of often bloody opposition — results in a young population that is not ashamed of wearing hats with a red star or of voting for aging socialists known for their fondness toward the USSR. Historical ignorance leads to the resurrection of ideas that have failed and have caused millions of deaths.

But historical revisionism is also used for foreign-policy purposes. Proffered by the highest echelons of a nation’s executive, it is more immediately dangerous, because it lays the foundation for a political posture that ignores key facts and tries to build a diplomatic or security architecture that is hostile to the very order it wants to protect. The most recent and worrisome example of such revisionism comes from the heart of Europe, Berlin, in the words of the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas.

Maas released a short article commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A heady and joyful event, the fall of the Wall was a victory against oppressive Communist regimes propped up by brute power. More broadly, the annus mirabilis of 1989 was a culmination of decades of sacrifice by the oppressed nations in Central and Eastern Europe, supported by the free nations of Western Europe and by the deep and long commitment of the United States to fight the evil ideology of Communism. For Maas, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a victory over “walls and borders,” admittedly in the name of freedom and rule of law, but he is vague about who in particular the opponent was. The socialist paradise of the proletariat, which built the Wall and the Iron Curtain from the Baltic to the Adriatic and was responsible for 100 million dead, remains unnamed as the enemy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Protesters Cut Bolivian Mayor’s Hair and Drag Him Through the Streets During Violent Protest By Rick Moran

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/protesters-cut-bolivian-mayors-hair-and-drag-him-through-the-streets-during-violent-protest/

The protests against the election of President Evo Morales in Bolivia are getting more violent as the opposition, claiming the election was stolen, stages mass protests throughout the country.

Clashes between pro-and anti-Morales demonstrators have turned deadly. A pro-Morales protester in the city of Cochabamba was killed during a clash with the opposition. Twenty-year-old Limbert Guzman became the third person killed during the violence.

In the small town of Vinto, a pro-Morales mayor was seized during a protest at city hall, dragged through the streets, and had her hair cut by demonstrators.

Fox News:

Meanwhile, in the town of Vinto, located about 210 miles from Cochabamba, the mayor of the governing Mas party was attacked by protesters after rumors that two members of the opposition had been killed by supporters of Morales, according to the BBC.

Vinto Mayor Patricia Arce Guzman was confronted at the town hall by protesters, who then dragged her out barefoot through the streets of the town as windows at the city building were broken and her office was set on fire.

Guzman was then forced to kneel down as demonstrators cut her hair, doused her in red paint, and forced her to sign a resignation letter all while yelling “murderess, murderess,” according to the BBC.

The violence stems from a hotly contested election that Morales won with 47 percent of the vote. But it was enough to avoid a runoff with the opposition candidate Carlos Mesa. What has riled the opposition was a 24-hour delay in the counting that the EU and the Organization of American States, independent monitors, expressed their grave concerns about after vote totals for Morales shot through the roof when the counting resumed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Erielle Davidson: Yovanovitch Emailed With Dem Staffer After Whistleblower Complaint, Contradicting Under-Oath Testimony

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/08/yovanovitch-emailed-with-dem-staffer-after-whistleblower-complaint-contradicting-under-oath-testimony/

What makes the email particularly unsettling is that it indicates former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch possibly committed perjury during her ‘impeachment inquiry’ deposition, where she was questioned under oath.

New email evidence has surfaced indicating that a Democratic staffer from the House Foreign Affairs Committee had contact with former President Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, contrary to information she provided in her “impeachment inquiry” deposition, according to exclusive information obtained by Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Yovanovitch has sat at the center of the House Democrats’ “impeachment probe,” earning her Resistance stripes after she was recalled from her post by President Trump in May 2019, following accusations of “serious partisanship” and “political bias.”

According to an exclusive email obtained by Carlson, the Democratic staffer, now identified by Fox News as Laura Carey, wrote the following to Yovanovitch on August 14, 2019, two days after the whistleblower complaint was filed, but an entire month before the complaint went public. It was sent from Carey’s official House email to Yovanovitch’s personal account:

I’m writing to see if you would have time to meet up for a chat – in particular, I’m hoping to discuss some Ukraine-related oversight questions we are exploring. I’d appreciate the chance to ground-truth a few pieces of information with you, some of which are quite delicate/time-sensitive and, thus, we want to make sure we get them right.

The timeline of this email is critical. It is known that the whistleblower contacted Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.) before filing his complaint. As Carlson points out, given that the above email was sent before the whistleblower complaint went public, it’s worth asking Schiff whether he had the audacity to contact other Democrat teams on the Hill about the complaint and its contents before it became public knowledge. In other words, what kind of stealthy (and possibly corrupt) machinations were taking place behind the scenes before the whistleblower’s complaint was used as a public pretext for launching an impeachment inquiry?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Neverending Foreign Wars Are Keeping The United States From Fixing The Border Crisis By Ellis Domenech

Posted By on November 9th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/07/neverending-foreign-wars-are-keeping-the-united-states-from-fixing-the-border-crisis/

What good is our powerful military stationed all over the world if on our very border there is a failing state?

It’s time for an overhaul of the U.S. national security establishment. No subjects of failed policy are more evident than Afghanistan and our southern border.

Afghanistan cost us $45 billion last year with little to show for it. Meanwhile, our southern border is awash with desperate human beings trying to make a better life in our great country. All the while narcotics are flowing across to feed our insatiable habit.

An incident just this week illustrated the violence escalating across the border in Mexico — this time against Americans, when a drug cartel ambushed the LeBaron family in broad daylight, killing at least three women and six children. All the while, the Mexican government fails to act.

Abraham Lincoln said as a young man:

From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia … could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.