Friday, January 29, 2016

Do 'experts' believe their own predictions?
...So to probe the seriousness of these economic experts' stated beliefs about the impending consequences of climate change, it's fair to ask if they personally put their own money where their mouths are. How many of these economists are, for example:

• Buying land in the upper Midwest and inland Canada (the price of which will rise significantly if global temperatures make much of the South, as well as coastal areas, quite unpleasant places to live)?

• Investing in pharmaceutical companies that own patents that extend beyond 2025 on medicines to treat illnesses that are especially prevalent in the tropics and subtropics?

• Shorting shares of companies that specialize in attracting tourists to subtropical and tropical destinations, especially those on or near seacoasts?...

If ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
...If the ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?

In response to the recent fanatical post by a global warming drone who fears that the rising tides will drown mankind, let him take solace in the fact that his climate guru, Al Gore, recently bought a $9 million beach front home in Montecito. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea....

2006: Al Gore Does Sundance, January 26, 2006
...And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said....

Fraud Detected In Science Research That Suggested GMO Crops Were Harmful
...Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found to contain manipulated and possibly falsified data. Nature reports: "Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim. The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. 'The case is very important also because these papers have been used politically in the debate on GM crops,' says Italian senator Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at the University of Milan whose concerns about the work triggered the investigation....

Stunning Rejection of Scientific Values of Transparency and Skepticism at New England Journal of Medicine
The headline is taken from a dismayed tweet from prominent open science advocate Brian Nosek. University of Virginia psychologist Nosek is the co-founder of the Center for Open Science. He was also the team leader for the massive project that sought to replicate 100 psychological studies taken from leading journals. The researchers reported in Science that only about one-third of the results from the selected studies could be reproduced....

...Evidently, Drazen hasn't changed his mind even as evidence has continued to pile up over the past 10 years that researchers are massively producing and publishing false positives.

If NEJM's editors are afraid that other researchers won't understand the choices, procedures, and parameters made by the original researchers, Nosek's Center for Open Science has a solution—use its Open Science Framework.

The Open Science Framework is organized around a free, open-source Web platform that supports research project management, collaboration, and the permanent archiving of scientific workflow and output. The OSF makes it easier to replicate studies because outside researchers can see and retrace the steps taken by the original scientific team.

It should go without saying that "research parasitism" is wrong. Researchers who use the results produced by other investigators should fully acknowledge that fact and give them credit when they publish their additional findings. But the lack of replication and the proliferation of false results in the scientific literature is a far bigger problem than "research parasitism."...

Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years' Temperatures With "Adjustments" While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year "The Hottest"?
...But now they may have gone too far -- in order to declare 2015 the "hottest on record," they apparently had to revise and "adjust" the previously declared all-time "hottest on record," 1997.

Because 1997 was more than three and half degrees warmer than 2015 -- going by NOAA's published data.

If they've now adjusted 1997's temperature down by three and a half degrees or more -- thus making the former All Time Hottest Year On Record not particularly hot -- this should be the lead, no?...

Feds Give Billions To Research Based On ‘Falsified Or Fabricated Data’
National Science Foundation officials award $7 billion in grants annually based on funding proposals the agency’s watchdog estimates have hundreds of examples of plagiarism and “falsified or fabricated data.”

The federal science research agency awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions annually, but Allison Lerner, the agency’s inspector general, only oversees about 1 percent of those recipients.

Researcher misconduct has drastically increased over the past decade, meaning millions of tax dollars go to fraudsters, according to Lerner.

The watchdog estimated that around 1,200 proposals for funding could contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according the IG’s semiannual report....
Muslim migrants not as stupid and simple as politically-correct Europeans seem to believe
...It strikes me that the really stupid, naive, unsophisticated people here are the Europeans who actually believe that this anti-social Muslim behavior comes about because Muslims are primitive people who are, for the first time, confronting an advanced society. To hold this position, Europeans must be willfully blind. Didn’t any of them notice the number of migrants who showed up with smart phones intact?...

...Here’s what I think is going on: The refugees are acting as they are, not because they see themselves as charity cases, but because they see themselves as conquerors. They know perfectly well that one doesn’t defecate in a pool in which people (especially children) are swimming. They’re doing it because they are performing the literal equivalent of the expression “I don’t give a shit about you.” They know you’re not supposed to rape women . . . that is, unless those women are the products of conquest, in which case raping them is one of Mohamed’s commandments....

Muslims are not like us, race equality chief says
Muslim communities are unlike others in Britain and the country should accept that they will not integrate in the same way, the former head of the equalities watchdog has said.

Trevor Phillips said that it was disrespectful to suppose that Muslim communities would change, claiming that we should accept that they “see the world differently from the rest of us”.

“Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect,” he told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday night. ...

'Who knows what horrors he has been through?' Swedish police chief sparks anger by SYMPATHISING with Somali boy, 15, charged with social worker's murder
The head of the Swedish police has sparked outrage by expressing sympathy with the teenage asylum seeker accused of murdering social worker Alexander Mezher.

National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson, who has already admitted police cannot cope with the wave of migrant crime, said he has concerns about the ‘horrors’ and trauma the accused murderer may have witnessed.

He said he was ‘distraught’ on behalf of Miss Mezher’s family but also for the killer, saying: ‘What has that person been through? Under what circumstances has he grown up? What is the trauma he carries?’...

Saturday, January 09, 2016

Cologne New Year gang assaults: Mayor says women should have code of conduct to prevent future assault
...Mayor Henriette Reker attended an emergency meeting with Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers and Wolfgang Wurm to discuss how to deal with the attack, where dozens of women were repeatedly touched and groped, with one case of alleged rape in the center of town.

“It is important to prevent such incidents from ever happening again,” said Mayor Reker, as reported in German by RP Online. “We have heard by now that they [the attacks] have occurred in other cities. This of course is not comforting to us.” ...

...The attackers were described as North African and Arab appearance by the police. The Mayor has said that not all of the attackers were newly-arrived refugees and had already been known to the police, as reported by The Local....

Incendiary Correctness
...The most shocking element of the stories is not their content but the fact that they were not made public until several days after the assaults. The Cologne police appear to have lied to downplay incidents they knew would be politically explosive, reporting on New Year's morning that the celebrations had been "largely peaceful." But the newsweekly Die Zeit reported on January 7 that the police had detained 70 men that night, many of whom could speak no German at all, and let them go. One can accept the Cologne police chief's account of his men's thinking: Where officers are overwhelmed by the size of a crowd — a thousand or so versus a couple dozen — the wise tactic is to clear the area rather than try to make arrests. But one cannot understand how the police expected their account to stand up when iPhone videos proving the contrary were lighting up German social media sites and getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

A scandalous political correctness has descended on Germany. Cologne's mayor Henriette Reker, who became an object of national sympathy when she was stabbed during the mayoral campaign last year, has in recent days been ridiculed for saying that any woman who wants can keep an importunate man at "arm's length." Thomas de Maizière, Chancellor Angela Merkel's interior minister, has criticized those who leap to the conclusion that the attackers had an Arab background. Such rumors can indeed spark baseless hatred, and are not to be indulged uncritically. But in the age of the Internet, it doesn't require a months-long investigation to figure out the truth. Go to YouTube, tap in "Köln" and "Silvester" (German for New Year's Eve), and you will discover a great big crowd of men of Mediterranean background milling about the Domplatz....

...No doubt there is a danger of incendiary reactions when people hear of mobs of Muslim foreigners groping young women in front of the country's most recognizable Christian landmark. But any government attempt to minimize or ignore such events would be a terrible mistake. It would be more likely to whip tempers up than to calm them down.

Police in Germany are covering up the extent of crime committed by migrants, claim Bild... as country is revealed to have taken in 1.1 MILLION people during 2015
Asylum seekers are being recruited as cheap drug dealers and traffickers as well as petty thieves, Bild newspaper claims
But police have apparently been ordered to cover up extent of crimes so as not to fuel 'right wing extremist debate'
Shocking claim comes as Germany registered over one million migrants in 2015 - five times last year's total
Germany has taken more refugees from the Middle East and Africa than any other EU state
The country is a magnet for migrants partly because of its generous social benefits

Two More Major German Cities Report New Year’s Sexual Assaults By ‘North African Groups’
...The news of the mass sexual assaults by “North African groups” of around 1,000 people didn’t break until Monday afternoon when Cologne’s police chief Wolfgang Albers called it a “completely new dimension of crime.” The number of total assaults has since grown from 60 to more than 100, spanning over three cities.

Similar incidents as the ones in Cologne took place in Stuttgart and Hamburg, with two and nine incidents, respectively. All three cities report the same profile of large groups groping women to distract them in order to steal their purses, but police say there are no indications of the events being related....

Cover-up claim over NYE mass sexual assaults
...Many people accused the national media of engaging in a cover-up due to the ethnic background of the criminals, with many pointing to the fact that it took days before the details of the story reached national attention.

One commentator wrote sarcastically that “it is fascinating that the event in Cologne on New Year made it through the media censorship.”..

...Writing for the Huffington Post Deutschland, Anabel Schunke accused the police of covering up details about the suspected criminals in order to protect public order.

Questioning why no details were given on the appearance of the suspects when police called for witnesses, despite plentiful CCTV footage, Schunke suggested that police chose to leave important details out so that the public would not make a connection between the crime and refugees....

Overwhelmed by 'Migrants,' Sweden Throws in the Towel as Europe Faces 'General, Permanent Terror Threat'
...But Sweden’s abrupt reversal is potentially far more consequential. Across Europe this year, two countries have stood out for their uncommonly generous reception policies: Sweden and Germany.

Now, Sweden is actively trying to keep people out, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure from critics within her own center-right coalition to do the same after the country welcomed a record 1 million asylum seekers this year. During her Christian Democratic Party conference in December, she bowed to those critics, at least in part, saying that Germany needed to “palpably reduce” its refugee numbers....

Man charged with setting Houston mosque fire was a devout attendee
...According to a charging instrument released by the Harris County District Clerk, Moore told investigators at the scene that he has attended the mosque for five years, coming five times per day to pray seven days per week.

Moore told investigators he had been at the mosque earlier on Dec. 25 to pray, and had left at about 2 p.m. to go home. Moore told investigators he was the last person to leave the mosque and saw no smoke or other signs of fire when he left. He had returned to the scene after hearing about the fire from a friend....

Teenage wife of Bataclan killer brags about her 'great life' in Iraq and how 'proud and happy' she is he helped murder 90 people
Wife of Samy Amimour wrote an email to a friend in days after Paris attacks
She boasted of how proud and happy that her husband killed 90 people
Bragged about how life in the ISIS stronghold of Mosul, Iraq was great
Amimour was one of 3 killers who gunned down music fans at the Bataclan music hall

Mother was mutilated and murdered by ISIS for breastfeeding her baby in public after another woman spotted the child under her burkha in Syria
Mother caught breastfeeding in Raqqa by ISIS's all-female police
Despite holding son under her burqa, al-Khansaa Brigade objected
Woman was mutilated before she was killed by al-Khansaa 'officers'
ISIS-linked social media sites said she had 'violated public decency'

A group of asylum-seekers and refugees staying at Hope Farm in South Africa threatened owners Andrew and Rae Wartnaby.
...In July, the headline read “Meet the angels who opened their hearts and home to 143 lost strangers,” and the left was drooling over the couple who followed their socialist values to the letter. Andrew and Rae Wartnaby opened up their 50-acre farmland to over 100 Muslim refugees who were reportedly displaced during “xenophobic attacks,” according to News 24.

After escaping Islamic brutality in the Central African Republic, the Muslim migrants traveled to South Africa, where they were again set upon by South African natives in black-on-black attacks. So, the good-natured yet naive white couple welcomed the refugee families to their land, which included Obama’s favored “widows and orphans.”

However, after only a few months of graciously allowing the Muslim migrants to live for free on their property, the loving couple soon found that they would actually be the refugees. The Wartnabys were threatened with slaughter by the same people they were helping escape brutality....

A Failure by Germany’s Elite
...The police failed to protect its citizens, the press dawdled in holding anyone to account (and see, too, those unanswered questions just above), and at least one politician even now seems to struggle to address the issue without suggesting that young women must somehow accommodate the possibility of assaults and “confusion.”

This all carries echoes of the Rotherham scandal, in which British authorities had for years turned a blind eye to a child abuse ring among Pakistani men in the north of England, seemingly at least in part for fear of looking racist. By the time anyone put a stop to it, an estimated 1,400 kids had been abused, often horrifically. Like the German police and politicians in this case—albeit on a much longer and larger scale—the British authorities may have put the need to appear sensitive over the need to enforce core values and basic human rights....

Suspects in Cologne sex attacks 'claimed to be Syrian refugees'
...But the leaked police report, published in Bild newspaper and Spiegel, a news magazine, claims that one of those involved told officers: “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”

Another tore up his residence permit before the eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow.”...