Sunday, February 15, 2015

INSIDE THE GLOBAL WARMING SCANDAL
...One of the areas that Homewood has looked at is Paraguay. In a post titled All of Paraguay’s temperature record has been tampered with, he found that GISS has systematically altered temperature records to make the past look cooler and the present warmer, and to create an entirely fictitious warming trend....

Jewish Journalist Compared To Hitler For Doubting Climate Change Claims
Journalist David Rose, who critically writes about climate policies for the Daily Mail, has been compared to Hitler (ironically, he’s Jewish), has been labeled a “climate change denier,” and someone even suggested that his own children murder him.

His fault? “My article was about the ‘climategate’ scandal, where leaked emails showed university scientists were trying to cover up data that suggested their claim the world is hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years may be wrong,” Rose wrote in an article for the Mail. He adds that he does believe that human-produced CO2 influences the climate, but he seriously doubts it’s the doom models are forecasting. For that, he earned a comment wishing for his children kill him.

He also received messages from self-proclaimed activists telling him they knew where his family lived and they furnished his personal phone numbers as proof.

Rose isn’t the only “denier” facing such vitriol. In fact, it’s rather mild compared to the beheading wish for climate journalist and science writer Matt Ridley. A comment from an article in The Guardian (since deleted but accessible through Breitbart) says, referencing to a chopped off head photo, “Should that not be Ridley’s severed head in the photo? We would actually solve a great deal of the world’s problems by chopping off everyone’s heads… Why are you deniers so touchy? Mere calls for a beheading evolve [sic] such a strong response in you people. Ask yourself a simple question: Would the world be a better place without Matt Ridley? Need I answer that question?” It was revealed that the comment was made by Blue Cloud, a.k.a Gary Evans, a well-know Greenpeace activist....
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
―― Michael Crichton

The Brian Williams scandal is an NBC News-wide scandal
...A production crew accompanied Williams on the helicopter outing. The Erik Wemple Blog has asked NBC News who and how many people were on that crew. But where have they been as Williams has gone about misremembering the episode in media appearances in recent years? Upon the 10th anniversary of the incident, the anchor visited David Letterman and couldn’t have been more unequivocal about having ridden in the ‘copter under attack: “Two of the four helicopters were hit, by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47,” Williams told the “Late Show” host.

Also in March 2013, Williams told Alec Baldwin in an interview on WNYC’s “Here’s The Thing.” Speaking of his tendency to say “I’ve got this” in sticky situations, he said, “And I’ve done some ridiculously stupid things under that banner, like being in a helicopter I had no business being in in Iraq with rounds coming into the airframe,” Williams said.

Again: Where were Williams’s crew members, who surely knew that Williams had either “conflated” his Chinook with another Chinook — his explanation — or was using the passage of time to embellish his own exploits — another explanation. And what of other NBC News employees who worked on the story? Why did they remain silent on these matters? Are they still with NBC News?

We put these questions to NBC News and haven’t heard back....

We shouldn’t believe Williams’ lie was an innocent mistake
...What Williams’ lie was about was what lies are always about: No one who actually scored the winning touchdown on the high-school football team misremembers it as sitting on the bench. The term “fish tale” does not mean you mistakenly tell people you caught a sickly ­8-ounce catfish when actually you snagged a 95-pound monster marlin....
Gun Businesses Seek Ways To Survive While Denied Basic Business Services
...The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report last month showing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) targeted gun dealers and other businesses like payday lenders and pawn shops as illegal operations, and pressured banks to halt dealing with these businesses. The administration’s program is now known as Operation Choke Point, which is run by the Departments of Justice and Treasury....

...“It’s appalling that our government is working around the law to vindictively attack businesses they find objectionable,” then-House Oversight Chairman Darrel Issa said in December.

“Internal FDIC documents confirm that Operation Choke Point is an extraordinary abuse of government power,” Issa said. “In the most egregious cases, federal bureaucrats injected personal moral judgments into the regulatory process. Such practices are totally inconsistent with basic principles of good government, transparency, and the rule of law.”...
At retreat, Dem staffers escort reporters to restroom
Reporters covering the House Democrats' retreat in Philadelphia this week are having a much different experience than when they’re on their home turf on Capitol Hill.

Reporters are being escorted to and from the restroom and lobby and are being barred from entering the hotel outside of scheduled events, even if they've been invited by a member of Congress.

During Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks at the retreat Friday, reporters were required to have a staff member, usually a junior member of the press team, escort them when going to the bathroom or to the lobby. The filing center for reporters was at a separate hotel from where the retreat was taking place, so access was limited to members of Congress specifically made available to the press.

“It was a police state. It was absurd how heavy handed the capitol police and Democratic staff were in trying to control everywhere the press went,” New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters said in an interview....

Davos’s Destructive Elites
Convening to ring the alarm about global warming, our putative betters and would-be rulers gathered in Davos, Switzerland, filling the local general-aviation hangars with some 1,700 private jets. Taking an international commercial flight is one of the most carbon-intensive things the typical person does in his life, but if you’re comparing carbon footprints between your average traveler squeezed into coach on American and Davos Man quaffing Pol Roger in his cashmere-carpeted intercontinental air limousine, you’re talking Smurfette vs. Sasquatch. The Bombardier’s Global 6000 may be a technical marvel, but it still runs on antique plankton juice. The emissions from heating all those sprawling hotel suites in the Alps in winter surely makes baby polar bears weep bitter and copious baby-polar-bear tears.

The stories add up: Jeff Greene brings multiple nannies on his private jet to Davos, and the rest of the guys gathered to talk past each other about the plight of the working man scarf down couture hot-dogs that cost forty bucks. Bill Clinton makes the case for wealth-redistribution while sporting a $60,000 platinum Rolex.

The hypocrisy of our literally (literally, Mr. Vice President!) high-flying crusaders against fossil fuels — who overlap considerably with our high-living crusaders against economic inequality — is endlessly annoying if frequently entertaining. And there is something unseemly about enduring puritanical little homilies on how we need to learn to live with less from guys wearing shoes that cost more than the typical American family earns in a quarter. ...
Gawker: Obama Secretly Partied With Bill Ayers Last Summer
...While the fact that Obama was literally partying with former advocates of violent struggle against the U.S. government will no doubt be taken by his critics as further evidence that he hates America, the most interesting thing about the wedding is the shocking proof it offers that—at long last!—Obama truly no longer gives a fuck about keeping up political appearances. It’s unthinkable that the Obama of the 2008 or 2012 campaigns would have been permitted to go anywhere near Ayers or Dohrn, for fear of fueling the unhinged right-wing narrative that he is a radical leftist....
Many progressives say that the 34 states that have passed laws requiring voters to have a government-issued photo ID are practicing "vote suppression." Does requiring a photo ID at airports constitute "travel suppression"? Visitors to the Justice Department are required to present photo IDs. Will you. . .plan to end this "visit suppression"?
-- George Will posing questions for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
-- Robert Conquest
What Really Happened?
...There is no doubt that private miscalculation and imprudence made matters worse for more than a few lending institutions and individual borrowers. (One can’t explain an unusual cluster of errors by citing greed, which is always around, just as one can’t explain a cluster of airplane crashes by citing gravity. Anyway, the greedy aim at profits, not losses.)...

...Second, Congress strengthened the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA had initially, from its passage in 1977, merely imposed reporting requirements on commercial banks. Amendments in 1995 empowered regulators to deny a bank with a low CRA rating permission to merge with another bank—at a time when the arrival of interstate banking made such approvals especially valuable—or even to open new branches. In response to the new CRA rules, some banks joined into partnerships with community groups to distribute millions in mortgage money to low-income borrowers previously considered non-creditworthy. Other banks took advantage of the newly authorized option to boost their CRA rating by purchasing special “CRA mortgage-backed securities,” that is, packages of disproportionately nonprime loans certified as meeting CRA criteria and securitized by Freddie Mac. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke aptly commented in a 2007 speech that “recent problems in mortgage markets illustrate that an underlying assumption of the CRA—that more lending equals better outcomes for local communities may not always hold.”[8]

Third, the Department of Housing and Urban Development pressured lenders for “affordable housing” loans. Beginning in 1993, HUD officials began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers that declined a higher percentage of minority applicants than white ones. To avoid legal trouble, lenders began relaxing their down-payment and income qualifications.[9]...

Hidden in plain sight: What really caused the world’s worst financial crisis — and why it could happen again

Free fall: How government policies brought down the housing market
...Nevertheless, there are plentiful data on commitments by large banks to make CRA-type loans in connection with applications to the Fed for permission to merge with small and medium-sized institutions between 1997 and 2007. In a 2007 report, for example, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) reported that in this ten-year period its member organizations had induced banks that were seeking merger approvals from the Fed and other agencies to commit almost $4.5 trillion in CRA-type lending. Press releases at the time these mergers were approved (available online) backed up this claim. After this report received publicity, it was pulled from NCRC’s website, though it is now available elsewhere on the web.[13] These report loans totaling $1.3 trillion made to fulfill prior commitments,[14] but determining the delinquency rates on these loans is impossible; banks have generally refused to make these data available, and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC)—established by Congress to investigate the causes of the 2008 financial crisis—did not seriously attempt to investigate this issue....

...In a market where prices are rising quickly, homeowners who cannot meet their mortgage obligations can often refinance or sell their homes without a loss. In the midst of a housing bubble, therefore, subprime loans can look like excellent risk-adjusted investments. For this reason, by 2004, private investors had become interested in PMBS backed by subprime loans; these securities were offering high yields but not showing losses commensurate with their risk. This phenomenon was helped along by the fact that the low interest rates in the early 2000s had produced a vast number of refinanced and unseasoned mortgages, which in their early years characteristically have low rates of delinquency and default. ...
This presumption of guilt is absolutely crucial to collectivism. The Left must teach its subjects to think of themselves as criminals. That's the only way law-abiding people will endure levels of coercive power that would normally require specific accusations, a fair trial, and the possibility of appeals. Social-justice "crimes" can be prosecuted without any of those things. There is no appeal from the sentence, and no statute of limitations on the crimes, as any left-winger who thinks today's American citizens need to suffer for the historical offense of slavery will be happy to explain to you. There's no evidence you can present in your defense, for the Left has read your mind, and knows better than you what demons lurk in its recesses. This is one reason the Left dislikes the trappings of constitutional law and order. The presumption of innocence is highly inconvenient for social crusades; it's the antithesis of collective political "justice."
-- John Hayward

The war on rape: the logic of the lynch mob returns
Five ways in which today’s feminist war on rape echoes the KKK’s war on rape.

...Automatic belief of rape accusations was a central principle of the KKK’s war on rape, too. This was one of the things that most shocked Ida B Wells, the early twentieth-century African-American journalist and civil-rights activist. ‘The word of the accuser is held to be true’, she said, which means that ‘the rule of law [is] reversed, and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the [accused] must prove himself innocent’. Wells and others were startled by the level of belief in the accusers of black men, and by the damning of anyone who dared to question such accusations, which was taken as an attack on the accuser’s ‘virtue’. ...

...One of the main ways in which racists there maintained social divisions and social order was through the spectre of rape. They promoted the idea that white women were under constant threat from ‘lustful black men’. Even though the black rape of white women was not a major problem, still the idea that there was a menacing culture of rape was indulged. ...

Moral Panics Won't End Campus Rape
...The most striking moment for me: when the fraternity brothers say they knew within 24 hours that the Rolling Stone story was false -- provably false, because their internal records and bank statements showed no party on the weekend in question, and no brothers matched the description of the alleged rapist. Yet the brothers kept quiet because they thought that fighting the story in the news media "would only make things more difficult."

Think about that. They had evidence they could have shown to a reporter to demonstrate the problems with a story, and they decided not to because that might only get them into deeper trouble. ...

...When people are in the grip of a moral panic, going up against them to question the extent of a threat, even by doubting so much as a single case, can become dangerous. Questioning any expression of the panic is not seen as a logical debate over statistics or the details of a particular instance, but as somehow defending the threatening behavior. Note how careful many people who wrote skeptically about the UVA case were to say that they believe campus rape happens, and it is terrible. People who write that they think an accused murderer may be innocent rarely feel compelled to affirm that yes, they sure do believe that murder happens, and boy, are they against that. This ought to go without saying, and unless we are in the middle of a moral panic, it usually does....

At Ohio State, you may be guilty of sexual assault if…
Consent Is…

The act of knowingly, actively and voluntarily agreeing explicitly to engage in sexual activity. Consent must be freely given and can be withdrawn at any time.

Sober
Not coerced
Imaginative
Enthusiastic
Creative
Wanted
Informed
Mutual
Honest
Verbal

The absence of “no” does not mean “yes”

It must be asked every step of the way

It cannot be implied or assumed, even in the context of a relationship

False Rape Accusation Leads To Alaska Man’s Beating Death ...The woman, 31-year-old Dominique Vasquez, reportedly did not want to admit to her boyfriend, 39-year-old Abraham Stine, that she had cheated on him and so lied about the rape, according to Alaska Dispatch News....

...“Later, Vasquez admitted she lied about being raped by Lord and she had consensual sex with him,” according to the complaint. “Vasquez knew Stine has a history of assaulting people, from her personal experience.”

Both Stine and Vasquez face second-degree murder charges, according to Alaska Dispatch News. Vasquez reportedly held her hand over Lord’s mouth while he was being assaulted.
IRS commissioner: Illegals are now eligible for tax credits under Obama’s amnesty — even for years past
...“Under the new program, if you get a Social Security number and you work, you’ll be eligible to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit,” Mr. Koskinen said.

He said that would apply even “if you did not file” taxes, as long as the illegal immigrant could demonstrate having worked off-the-books during those years.

That expands the universe of people eligible for the tax credit by millions. He said only about 700,000 illegal immigrants currently work and pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, but as many as 4 million illegal immigrants could get a stay of deportation and work permits under the temporary amnesty, which would mean they would be eligible to claim back-refunds if they worked those years....