Around the world in 80 lays: Traveller who bonked her way out of heartbreak after split with long-term boyfriend
HEARTBROKEN after being dumped, Laura Jane Williams indulged her passion for travelling – but instead of sight-seeing, she immersed herself in local culture by sleeping with countless men.
The 30-year-old writer from Derby went on a sex spree in Europe, America and the UK – detailed in her book, Becoming – until her bed-hopping came to a sudden and bizarre end...
... pulled one man in a bar while carrying a tray of greasy chips.
Another was a 19-year-old father of one who I had sex with every night for a month. I treated him like dirt — and when I ended it he chased me down his road in his pyjamas to tell me he loved me....
Sunday, June 12, 2016
The federal government should buy coal plants, shut them down and pay to retrain their employees
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
Professional Educator: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy
...Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues....
But Hackman acknowledged in the current white supremacist system, there is some expectation that teachers will know conventional English and possess other basic knowledge. As a result, she admitted modern activist teachers should try to learn those things sufficiently to get a job, but only for the purpose of infiltrating schools to change them from within.
“My long game was, get you in, get you tenured, get you in that system and change that system,” she said.......She predicted her approach will triumph, and the sinister force she dubbed “Super-Whitey” (and compared to the Eye of Sauron) will eventually be swept aside.
“Your time has come,” Hackman said. “If I was a white faculty member and unwilling to get with the program, I do not have any business in teacher education … We do see you, Super-Whitey. We’re coming for you.”
...Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues....
But Hackman acknowledged in the current white supremacist system, there is some expectation that teachers will know conventional English and possess other basic knowledge. As a result, she admitted modern activist teachers should try to learn those things sufficiently to get a job, but only for the purpose of infiltrating schools to change them from within.
“My long game was, get you in, get you tenured, get you in that system and change that system,” she said.......She predicted her approach will triumph, and the sinister force she dubbed “Super-Whitey” (and compared to the Eye of Sauron) will eventually be swept aside.
“Your time has come,” Hackman said. “If I was a white faculty member and unwilling to get with the program, I do not have any business in teacher education … We do see you, Super-Whitey. We’re coming for you.”
Number of hate crimes against Jews soars as report says anti-semitism is at the 'core' of far-Left beliefs
Number of hate crimes against Jews in Britain has reached shocking high
Police recorded almost 1,000 anti-Semitic offences in 2015 - up 25 per cent
Findings revealed ‘growth in anti-Semitism as core part of far-Left’ ideology
Report comes as the Labour Party is gripped by anti-Semitism allegations
...The report says that there has been a ‘growth in anti-Semitism as a core part of far-Left’ ideology. The findings come as the Labour Party is gripped by anti-Semitism allegations: MP Naz Shah and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone have both been suspended in the past week, and an internal investigation has been set up by beleaguered party leader Jeremy Corbyn...
Number of hate crimes against Jews in Britain has reached shocking high
Police recorded almost 1,000 anti-Semitic offences in 2015 - up 25 per cent
Findings revealed ‘growth in anti-Semitism as core part of far-Left’ ideology
Report comes as the Labour Party is gripped by anti-Semitism allegations
...The report says that there has been a ‘growth in anti-Semitism as a core part of far-Left’ ideology. The findings come as the Labour Party is gripped by anti-Semitism allegations: MP Naz Shah and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone have both been suspended in the past week, and an internal investigation has been set up by beleaguered party leader Jeremy Corbyn...
Radical tourists have been deluded pimps for Venezuela
...Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. For those who yearn in their dark hearts for strong men, who can crush all enemies, Chavismo reeked of machismo, and provided the great leaders they could adore.
“Hated by the entrenched classes,” burbled a star-struck and grief-stricken Oliver Stone on the day of the leader’s death, “Hugo Chávez will live for ever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”...
...I could go on, but a last desperate excuse needs to be dismissed. Every oil-producing economy has been hit by falling prices, but none, not even states as ill-governed as Nigeria and Russia, has experienced the social collapse of Venezuela. Even they did not engage in the Weimar-scale money-printing of the Chavista regime. Even they, despite all the stout efforts of their leaders, were not as corrupt as the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela. Transparency International puts Venezuela among the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world. First Chávez and then Maduro did, indeed, redistribute oil wealth to the poor, but they distributed most of it to their clients....
...The thoughts of Venezuelans, who watched as westerners treated their country as an ideological playground, cannot be dismissed lightly, either. “There should be a special circle in hell for them,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, told me. The regime shot his mother and jailed his Venezuelan father. It holds his cousin, the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, as a political prisoner because he had the nerve to oppose it. Halvorssen thinks the Chavistas would not have gone so far in debasing the constitution and looting the state if it had not been able to count on a herd of bovine leftists mooing down all who raised concerns about fundamental rights....
The Venezuelan Effort to Build a New Food and Agriculture System
....In early 2009, as the financial crisis dominated headlines, Chávez made a similar promise: “Despite the world financial crisis, Venezuela’s agrarian revolution will not be detained.”37 The recent decline in oil prices has led some to wonder what will become of the Bolivarian Revolution and its social programs and to point to reliance on oil wealth for social spending as a strategic flaw. Others, however, see the government using its oil wealth to diversify the economy and to build new systems that will ultimately sustain themselves. This is what Chávez claims to be doing with respect to the country’s food sovereignty efforts. A promising indication is that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recently recognized Venezuela as having taken necessary steps to strengthen its ability and that of its neighbors to withstand the worsening global food crisis.37 As other countries throughout the world, including the United States, grapple with food issues amid global crises, perhaps they can learn from the experience of Venezuela, where political will and community empowerment are forming the basis for food sovereignty.
Marching in Place
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible —- the really disquieting —- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right-—the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
-- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
...Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. For those who yearn in their dark hearts for strong men, who can crush all enemies, Chavismo reeked of machismo, and provided the great leaders they could adore.
“Hated by the entrenched classes,” burbled a star-struck and grief-stricken Oliver Stone on the day of the leader’s death, “Hugo Chávez will live for ever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”...
...I could go on, but a last desperate excuse needs to be dismissed. Every oil-producing economy has been hit by falling prices, but none, not even states as ill-governed as Nigeria and Russia, has experienced the social collapse of Venezuela. Even they did not engage in the Weimar-scale money-printing of the Chavista regime. Even they, despite all the stout efforts of their leaders, were not as corrupt as the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela. Transparency International puts Venezuela among the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world. First Chávez and then Maduro did, indeed, redistribute oil wealth to the poor, but they distributed most of it to their clients....
...The thoughts of Venezuelans, who watched as westerners treated their country as an ideological playground, cannot be dismissed lightly, either. “There should be a special circle in hell for them,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, told me. The regime shot his mother and jailed his Venezuelan father. It holds his cousin, the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, as a political prisoner because he had the nerve to oppose it. Halvorssen thinks the Chavistas would not have gone so far in debasing the constitution and looting the state if it had not been able to count on a herd of bovine leftists mooing down all who raised concerns about fundamental rights....
The Venezuelan Effort to Build a New Food and Agriculture System
....In early 2009, as the financial crisis dominated headlines, Chávez made a similar promise: “Despite the world financial crisis, Venezuela’s agrarian revolution will not be detained.”37 The recent decline in oil prices has led some to wonder what will become of the Bolivarian Revolution and its social programs and to point to reliance on oil wealth for social spending as a strategic flaw. Others, however, see the government using its oil wealth to diversify the economy and to build new systems that will ultimately sustain themselves. This is what Chávez claims to be doing with respect to the country’s food sovereignty efforts. A promising indication is that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recently recognized Venezuela as having taken necessary steps to strengthen its ability and that of its neighbors to withstand the worsening global food crisis.37 As other countries throughout the world, including the United States, grapple with food issues amid global crises, perhaps they can learn from the experience of Venezuela, where political will and community empowerment are forming the basis for food sovereignty.
Marching in Place
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible —- the really disquieting —- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right-—the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
-- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Sunday, June 05, 2016
Presidents of ABC and CBS News Have Siblings Working at White House With Ties to Benghazi
"CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi."...
...For the record, Ben Sherwood's sister, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, is the Special Assistant to Barack Obama.
Virginia Moseley's husband, Tom Nides, is the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources.
As for David Rhodes' brother Ben, he is Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication...
Did the New York Times just accidentally tell the truth about the Obama administration?
...Rhodes’s story is even stranger when you start at the beginning. It turns out he was an aspiring writer of fiction—keep this thought at your elbow—who tumbled (with a nudge of nepotism) into Washington’s foreign policy cliques. Rhodes had no background or experience in international relations—a blank slate—but he held a pretty handy pen. So he got into speechwriting, and then into the Obama campaign in 2007, and then into a basement office at the White House after the 2008 election, from which he exerts an almost inconceivable measure of influence. Walter Mitty could not have told a less likely tale....
White House seeks to contain fallout from aide’s comments
...Rhodes, who is 38 and holds a master of fine arts in creative writing, derided the press corps as too naive to cover world events.
He said the average reporter the White House talks to “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” suggesting that allowed him to easily manipulate media coverage of U.S. foreign policy.
“They literally know nothing,” he said. ...
Charlie Rose and President’s Speechwriters Laugh About ObamaCare Lie
CHARLIE ROSE: My point is do you have equal impact on serious speeches? Because it’s about style, use of language, etcetera?
JON LOVETT, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: I really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.
JON FAVREAU, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
LOVETT: How dare you!
[laughter]
LOVETT: And you know what? It’s still true! No.
"CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi."...
...For the record, Ben Sherwood's sister, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, is the Special Assistant to Barack Obama.
Virginia Moseley's husband, Tom Nides, is the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources.
As for David Rhodes' brother Ben, he is Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication...
Did the New York Times just accidentally tell the truth about the Obama administration?
...Rhodes’s story is even stranger when you start at the beginning. It turns out he was an aspiring writer of fiction—keep this thought at your elbow—who tumbled (with a nudge of nepotism) into Washington’s foreign policy cliques. Rhodes had no background or experience in international relations—a blank slate—but he held a pretty handy pen. So he got into speechwriting, and then into the Obama campaign in 2007, and then into a basement office at the White House after the 2008 election, from which he exerts an almost inconceivable measure of influence. Walter Mitty could not have told a less likely tale....
White House seeks to contain fallout from aide’s comments
...Rhodes, who is 38 and holds a master of fine arts in creative writing, derided the press corps as too naive to cover world events.
He said the average reporter the White House talks to “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” suggesting that allowed him to easily manipulate media coverage of U.S. foreign policy.
“They literally know nothing,” he said. ...
Charlie Rose and President’s Speechwriters Laugh About ObamaCare Lie
CHARLIE ROSE: My point is do you have equal impact on serious speeches? Because it’s about style, use of language, etcetera?
JON LOVETT, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: I really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.
JON FAVREAU, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
LOVETT: How dare you!
[laughter]
LOVETT: And you know what? It’s still true! No.
The federal government should buy coal plants, shut them down and pay to retrain their employees
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
Radar images reveal Mars is coming out of an ice age
An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday....
Global Warming Scaled Back, Say Two New Studies
...Two new studies look at the long-run projections of climate computer models and suggest that they are running too hot. One critical parameter is equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is conventionally defined as the amounf of warming that can be expected from doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the current issue of the journal, Earth and Space Science, mathematician J. Ray Bates, from the Meteorology and Climate Centre at the University College Dublin, calculates climate sensitivity focusing specifically the meteorological dynamics in the tropics that are mostly ignored in climate models. Basically, the tropics are more effective at expelling extra heat into space than the models project.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change widened its range of climate sensitivity estimates to 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in its latest report, dropping the lower bound from 2 degrees. The new study suggests that climate sensitivity could be much the lower, about 1 degree C for doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. If this were true, then the climates models are proejcting future temperarture increases that are 2 to 4 times hotter than the actual likely trend. It is worth noting that the satellite data find that the global rate of temperature increase since 1979 has been +0.12 degree Celsius per decade which suggests that the lower estimates of climate sensitivity may be correct.
Another study published in Nature by the researchers at European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN finds that the world was much cloudier in the pre-industrial age than previously thought. The researchers suggest that a cloudier world was a cooler world. Computer climate models assume that man-made atmospheric pollutants like sulfur dioxide have increased modern cloudiness which has further shielded the planet from higher temperatures. If it turns out that early eras were somewhat cloudier than represented in the models that means that future warming has again been overestimated....
25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’
...Would you believe it was eight years ago today that the United Nations predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.” This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. from issuing more apocalyptic predictions since.
To celebrate more than two decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation presents this list of some of the “greatest” predictions made by scientists, activists and politicians — most of which we’ve now passed....
...The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”...
...There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge. (Plant owners could dispute the amount of compensation offered but not the public purpose of federal action intended to protect the environment.) ...
Radar images reveal Mars is coming out of an ice age
An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday....
Global Warming Scaled Back, Say Two New Studies
...Two new studies look at the long-run projections of climate computer models and suggest that they are running too hot. One critical parameter is equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is conventionally defined as the amounf of warming that can be expected from doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the current issue of the journal, Earth and Space Science, mathematician J. Ray Bates, from the Meteorology and Climate Centre at the University College Dublin, calculates climate sensitivity focusing specifically the meteorological dynamics in the tropics that are mostly ignored in climate models. Basically, the tropics are more effective at expelling extra heat into space than the models project.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change widened its range of climate sensitivity estimates to 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in its latest report, dropping the lower bound from 2 degrees. The new study suggests that climate sensitivity could be much the lower, about 1 degree C for doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. If this were true, then the climates models are proejcting future temperarture increases that are 2 to 4 times hotter than the actual likely trend. It is worth noting that the satellite data find that the global rate of temperature increase since 1979 has been +0.12 degree Celsius per decade which suggests that the lower estimates of climate sensitivity may be correct.
Another study published in Nature by the researchers at European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN finds that the world was much cloudier in the pre-industrial age than previously thought. The researchers suggest that a cloudier world was a cooler world. Computer climate models assume that man-made atmospheric pollutants like sulfur dioxide have increased modern cloudiness which has further shielded the planet from higher temperatures. If it turns out that early eras were somewhat cloudier than represented in the models that means that future warming has again been overestimated....
25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’
...Would you believe it was eight years ago today that the United Nations predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.” This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. from issuing more apocalyptic predictions since.
To celebrate more than two decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation presents this list of some of the “greatest” predictions made by scientists, activists and politicians — most of which we’ve now passed....
...The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”...
California to extend Obamacare to illegal immigrants using ‘innovation waiver’
California legislators have passed a bill which would allow illegal immigrants to purchase insurance on the state’s Obamacare exchange. The bill first has to be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and then the change would need to be approved by the federal government.
If approved, the change would break another promise made by President Obama when selling the law to Americans. During a 2009 address to Congress Obama said, “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants.” He added, “This too is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” That was when Rep. Joe Wilson famously interjected, “You lie!” The break in decorum earned him an official rebuke.
According to U.S. News and World Report, just two years after the program took effect it looks like the president’s promise is about to be undone in America’s largest state...
Europe Demands Referendum Ban After Immigration Policy Rejected
A former European Union official has called for a ban on referenda across the bloc following the Dutch rejection of EU’s immigration policy in a nationwide poll last week. Voters in The Netherlands were promised the right to decide whether every Ukrainian should be given the right to live in their country, but when they voted no the EU said it would push ahead anyway.
Fraser Cameron, a former senior adviser to the European Commission, has now said Brussels should consider outlawing referenda altogether because democracy are making it harder for the EU to push through what it wants....
'You mustn't touch me, you mustn't touch me': New footage of Cologne New Year sex attacks shows screaming woman as overwhelmed police struggle to control crowds of migrant men
New footage of mob sex attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve
Shows police struggling to contain the crowds at main train station
Over 1,100 criminal complaints filed after New Years in Cologne
Labour's 'secret plan' to lure migrants
...The paper said migration would “enhance economic growth” and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be “economically damaging”. But it also stated that immigration had general “benefits” and that a new policy framework was needed to “maximise” the contribution of migration to the Government’s wider social aims.
The Government has always denied that social engineering played a part in its migration policy.
However, the paper, which was written in 2000 at a time when immigration began to increase dramatically, said controls were contrary to its policy objectives and could lead to “social exclusion”....
...Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour....
...Labour has overseen an unprecedented rise in immigration, which has led to a rise of about three million in the UK population since 1997. Until recently, it accused opponents who called for tougher controls of playing the “race card”. Labour was forced to change its rhetoric amid concerns that the economic and social reality of immigration had alienated voters in its heartlands.....
Conman Blair's cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM's betrayal bare
Tom Bower's new book Broken Vows: Tony Blair - The Tragedy of Power lays bare how PM presided over a silent conspiracy to change face of UK
Book reveals how Blair instructed ministers to wave tens of thousands of asylum seekers into the UK under cover of their being ‘economic migrants’
Also sheds light on his shocking dealings with some of the world's worst dictators, his relationship with Wendi Deng and Cherie's jealousy
...But behind the scenes ministers were instructed to wave tens of thousands of asylum seekers into the UK under cover of their being ‘economic migrants’. Astonishingly, the minister Mr Blair put in charge of borders ruled against deporting failed claimants because it would be too ‘emotional’....
By the way, Syrian refugees almost sunk Sweden’s welfare state
...In Sweden, there initially was little since the country has historically taken in many refugees across various countries, and it has a very liberal refugee policy. Yet, it’s one where the resources of the state have been pushed to the brink, where new restrictive policies have been adopted to curb the cost of housing the latest influx of refugees, especially from Syria, and where the whole attitude towards refugees has devolved into a debate that’s fractured this society, along with the rest of the European continent....
...Back at the Red Cross station, opinion was surprisingly anti-refugee, including among volunteers. The translator said that he did not believe many of the new arrivals would ever be able to integrate into Sweden’s liberal, individualistic society. A border policeman told me, “Last summer, my grandmother almost starved to death in the hospital, but the migrants get free food and medical care. I think a government’s job is to take care of its own people first, and then, if there’s anything left over, you help other people.” I had heard the same view a few months earlier in Hungary, the country in Europe most outspokenly hostile to refugees — the anti-Sweden....
...Even before Sweden slammed on the brakes, it seemed that the country had posed for itself a test that it could not pass, and could not acknowledge that it could not pass. The financial costs, even for one of Europe’s richest countries, were daunting. Sweden expects to spend about 7 percent of its $100 billion budget next year on refugees. The real number is somewhat higher, since the costs of educating and training those who have already received asylum are not included in that figure. It is, in any case, double the 2015 budget. Where will the additional funds come from? It’s not clear yet, but since the cost of caring for refugees is considered a form of development assistance, Sweden has already cut 30 percent of its very generous foreign aid budget, which largely goes to fortify the very countries from which people are now fleeing, to help make up the difference. Other European donors, including Norway, have done so as well.
The refugee issue has split Sweden’s genteel consensus as no other question has in recent memory. As Ivar Arpi, a columnist at the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and an inveterate critic of the country’s refugee policy, said to me, “People have lost friends over this; families are divided against one another. I’ve had agonizing discussions with my mother and my little sister.” It is very hard to find a middle ground between “we must” and “we can’t.” One of the few people I spoke to who was seeking one was Diana Janse of the Moderates. I asked her if she feared that Sweden was in the process of committing suicide. “It’s an open question,” Janse replied. She worried that the costs of Sweden’s generosity were only beginning to come due, and no one cared to tally them. She had just learned that since the right to 450 days of parental leave per child enshrined in Swedish laws also applies to women who arrive in the country with children under seven, refugees could qualify for several years’ worth of paid leave — even without working, since unemployed women also receive maternal benefits. She was convinced that Sweden needed to end the practice of giving Swedish social payments to refugees, not only because it was unaffordable, but because Sweden had no interest in out-bidding its neighbors to woo refugees.
At first the Swedish government made several very modest concessions to this ugly reality. In November, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven disclosed that migrants would no longer be granted permanent asylum, and thus no longer become eligible for the massive package of social benefits that comes with it. Applicants, if approved, would receive a three-year temporary residency permit with the possibility of renewal. Refugees could still bring in spouses and children under “family reunification” policy, but those relatives would not qualify for social benefits. In late December, Sweden finally threw in the towel. Henceforth, no one would be permitted to enter Sweden without proper identity documents. The new regulations, no longer described as temporary, violated the Schengen regimen; soon after, Austria imposed similar rules. The refugee crisis has, at least temporarily, ended free movement across borders, one of the signal achievements of the European Union.
Since many refugees arrive without passports or other valid forms of identification, the new rules sharply curtailed the number of asylum-seekers arriving overland who would be permitted to enter the country. Cross-border immigration has, in fact, come to an almost complete stop. Sweden now accepts only those refugees arriving directly from Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and cleared by the U.N. refugee agency. After taking 160,000 refugees — 30,000 less than the maximum it had projected — Sweden had finally run out of room, money, and patience....
It's not their fault, it's yours! Swedish GIRLS blamed for rise in migrant sex attacks
SWEDISH police have blamed Scandinavian teenage girls' “Nordic alcohol culture” and Western behaviour for a steep rise in sex attacks carried out by migrants.
The damning police report, which is looking at why Sweden has the worst rates of physical and sexual violence committed against women and girls in Europe, has also excused refugees who it says “cannot handle the alcohol”.
Shockingly, the report revealed the majority of sex attack victims were under the age 15.
Police also admitted the majority of attacks have taken place in public places had been committed by migrants.
But it says refugees might not be able to “handle the alcohol” and simply feel “horny” and have “ignorance of the consequences for the girls”....
...The report comes after it emerged gangs of young men, believed to have been migrants, molested women in Malmö, Karlstad and Kalmar in Sweden on New Year’s Eve....
California legislators have passed a bill which would allow illegal immigrants to purchase insurance on the state’s Obamacare exchange. The bill first has to be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and then the change would need to be approved by the federal government.
If approved, the change would break another promise made by President Obama when selling the law to Americans. During a 2009 address to Congress Obama said, “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants.” He added, “This too is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” That was when Rep. Joe Wilson famously interjected, “You lie!” The break in decorum earned him an official rebuke.
According to U.S. News and World Report, just two years after the program took effect it looks like the president’s promise is about to be undone in America’s largest state...
Europe Demands Referendum Ban After Immigration Policy Rejected
A former European Union official has called for a ban on referenda across the bloc following the Dutch rejection of EU’s immigration policy in a nationwide poll last week. Voters in The Netherlands were promised the right to decide whether every Ukrainian should be given the right to live in their country, but when they voted no the EU said it would push ahead anyway.
Fraser Cameron, a former senior adviser to the European Commission, has now said Brussels should consider outlawing referenda altogether because democracy are making it harder for the EU to push through what it wants....
'You mustn't touch me, you mustn't touch me': New footage of Cologne New Year sex attacks shows screaming woman as overwhelmed police struggle to control crowds of migrant men
New footage of mob sex attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve
Shows police struggling to contain the crowds at main train station
Over 1,100 criminal complaints filed after New Years in Cologne
Labour's 'secret plan' to lure migrants
...The paper said migration would “enhance economic growth” and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be “economically damaging”. But it also stated that immigration had general “benefits” and that a new policy framework was needed to “maximise” the contribution of migration to the Government’s wider social aims.
The Government has always denied that social engineering played a part in its migration policy.
However, the paper, which was written in 2000 at a time when immigration began to increase dramatically, said controls were contrary to its policy objectives and could lead to “social exclusion”....
...Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour....
...Labour has overseen an unprecedented rise in immigration, which has led to a rise of about three million in the UK population since 1997. Until recently, it accused opponents who called for tougher controls of playing the “race card”. Labour was forced to change its rhetoric amid concerns that the economic and social reality of immigration had alienated voters in its heartlands.....
Conman Blair's cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM's betrayal bare
Tom Bower's new book Broken Vows: Tony Blair - The Tragedy of Power lays bare how PM presided over a silent conspiracy to change face of UK
Book reveals how Blair instructed ministers to wave tens of thousands of asylum seekers into the UK under cover of their being ‘economic migrants’
Also sheds light on his shocking dealings with some of the world's worst dictators, his relationship with Wendi Deng and Cherie's jealousy
...But behind the scenes ministers were instructed to wave tens of thousands of asylum seekers into the UK under cover of their being ‘economic migrants’. Astonishingly, the minister Mr Blair put in charge of borders ruled against deporting failed claimants because it would be too ‘emotional’....
By the way, Syrian refugees almost sunk Sweden’s welfare state
...In Sweden, there initially was little since the country has historically taken in many refugees across various countries, and it has a very liberal refugee policy. Yet, it’s one where the resources of the state have been pushed to the brink, where new restrictive policies have been adopted to curb the cost of housing the latest influx of refugees, especially from Syria, and where the whole attitude towards refugees has devolved into a debate that’s fractured this society, along with the rest of the European continent....
...Back at the Red Cross station, opinion was surprisingly anti-refugee, including among volunteers. The translator said that he did not believe many of the new arrivals would ever be able to integrate into Sweden’s liberal, individualistic society. A border policeman told me, “Last summer, my grandmother almost starved to death in the hospital, but the migrants get free food and medical care. I think a government’s job is to take care of its own people first, and then, if there’s anything left over, you help other people.” I had heard the same view a few months earlier in Hungary, the country in Europe most outspokenly hostile to refugees — the anti-Sweden....
...Even before Sweden slammed on the brakes, it seemed that the country had posed for itself a test that it could not pass, and could not acknowledge that it could not pass. The financial costs, even for one of Europe’s richest countries, were daunting. Sweden expects to spend about 7 percent of its $100 billion budget next year on refugees. The real number is somewhat higher, since the costs of educating and training those who have already received asylum are not included in that figure. It is, in any case, double the 2015 budget. Where will the additional funds come from? It’s not clear yet, but since the cost of caring for refugees is considered a form of development assistance, Sweden has already cut 30 percent of its very generous foreign aid budget, which largely goes to fortify the very countries from which people are now fleeing, to help make up the difference. Other European donors, including Norway, have done so as well.
The refugee issue has split Sweden’s genteel consensus as no other question has in recent memory. As Ivar Arpi, a columnist at the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and an inveterate critic of the country’s refugee policy, said to me, “People have lost friends over this; families are divided against one another. I’ve had agonizing discussions with my mother and my little sister.” It is very hard to find a middle ground between “we must” and “we can’t.” One of the few people I spoke to who was seeking one was Diana Janse of the Moderates. I asked her if she feared that Sweden was in the process of committing suicide. “It’s an open question,” Janse replied. She worried that the costs of Sweden’s generosity were only beginning to come due, and no one cared to tally them. She had just learned that since the right to 450 days of parental leave per child enshrined in Swedish laws also applies to women who arrive in the country with children under seven, refugees could qualify for several years’ worth of paid leave — even without working, since unemployed women also receive maternal benefits. She was convinced that Sweden needed to end the practice of giving Swedish social payments to refugees, not only because it was unaffordable, but because Sweden had no interest in out-bidding its neighbors to woo refugees.
At first the Swedish government made several very modest concessions to this ugly reality. In November, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven disclosed that migrants would no longer be granted permanent asylum, and thus no longer become eligible for the massive package of social benefits that comes with it. Applicants, if approved, would receive a three-year temporary residency permit with the possibility of renewal. Refugees could still bring in spouses and children under “family reunification” policy, but those relatives would not qualify for social benefits. In late December, Sweden finally threw in the towel. Henceforth, no one would be permitted to enter Sweden without proper identity documents. The new regulations, no longer described as temporary, violated the Schengen regimen; soon after, Austria imposed similar rules. The refugee crisis has, at least temporarily, ended free movement across borders, one of the signal achievements of the European Union.
Since many refugees arrive without passports or other valid forms of identification, the new rules sharply curtailed the number of asylum-seekers arriving overland who would be permitted to enter the country. Cross-border immigration has, in fact, come to an almost complete stop. Sweden now accepts only those refugees arriving directly from Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and cleared by the U.N. refugee agency. After taking 160,000 refugees — 30,000 less than the maximum it had projected — Sweden had finally run out of room, money, and patience....
It's not their fault, it's yours! Swedish GIRLS blamed for rise in migrant sex attacks
SWEDISH police have blamed Scandinavian teenage girls' “Nordic alcohol culture” and Western behaviour for a steep rise in sex attacks carried out by migrants.
The damning police report, which is looking at why Sweden has the worst rates of physical and sexual violence committed against women and girls in Europe, has also excused refugees who it says “cannot handle the alcohol”.
Shockingly, the report revealed the majority of sex attack victims were under the age 15.
Police also admitted the majority of attacks have taken place in public places had been committed by migrants.
But it says refugees might not be able to “handle the alcohol” and simply feel “horny” and have “ignorance of the consequences for the girls”....
...The report comes after it emerged gangs of young men, believed to have been migrants, molested women in Malmö, Karlstad and Kalmar in Sweden on New Year’s Eve....
Great moments in education: The French teacher who doesn’t speak French
...The teacher, Albert Moyer, said in a brief phone interview that the extent of his French education was just one year in high school. So why was he hired? To replace Jean Cius, a certified French teacher for more than 25 years.
“It makes me extremely mad,” Cius said. “I feel bad for the fact that the kids are not learning.”
Records show after a dispute in December, the school’s principal removed Cius from campus. But when he was later declared fit for duty, HISD did not give him back his old job, or any teaching job for that matter. Cius was sent to another HISD campus, where he said he was assigned to monitor the halls.
“I feel so bad for the taxpayers because they’re paying me for not doing anything at all,” he said....
Professional Educator: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy
...Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.
In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.
“Education is not about the mere reproduction of knowledge,” Hackman said. “Education is the practice of freedom. And as a result, we have to have [teaching] students becomes activists as well as teachers.”
Creating educators who are proper activists, Hackman continued, means training them to not only to encourage diversity but also to engage with the systemic oppression she says is pervasive in the entire educational system. In Hackman’s telling, virtually everything associated with being a good student in modern education is actually just a tool of racist white supremacy.
“The racial narrative of White tends to be like this: Rugged individual, honest, hard-working, disciplined, rigorous, successful,” she said. “And so then, the narrative of U.S. public education: Individual assessments, competition, outcome over process (I care more about your grades than how you’re doing), ‘discipline’ where we care more about your attendance and making sure you’re not tardy than we care about your relationships … proper English must be spoken (which is just assimilation into standard U.S. dialect), hierarchical power structure, and heavy goal orientation.”...
...Hackman said when she was a professor, she freely employed these methods with her own students. She once let a student complete an essay assignment as a graphic novel, and allowed students to write in non-standard English or even foreign languages she herself couldn’t read.
“If I don’t know [your language,] frankly, that’s my issue,” she said. “All I need to know is that you’re thinking about it, I don’t really care how you do it.”
But Hackman acknowledged in the current white supremacist system, there is some expectation that teachers will know conventional English and possess other basic knowledge. As a result, she admitted modern activist teachers should try to learn those things sufficiently to get a job, but only for the purpose of infiltrating schools to change them from within.
“My long game was, get you in, get you tenured, get you in that system and change that system,” she said.......She predicted her approach will triumph, and the sinister force she dubbed “Super-Whitey” (and compared to the Eye of Sauron) will eventually be swept aside.
“Your time has come,” Hackman said. “If I was a white faculty member and unwilling to get with the program, I do not have any business in teacher education … We do see you, Super-Whitey. We’re coming for you.”
...The teacher, Albert Moyer, said in a brief phone interview that the extent of his French education was just one year in high school. So why was he hired? To replace Jean Cius, a certified French teacher for more than 25 years.
“It makes me extremely mad,” Cius said. “I feel bad for the fact that the kids are not learning.”
Records show after a dispute in December, the school’s principal removed Cius from campus. But when he was later declared fit for duty, HISD did not give him back his old job, or any teaching job for that matter. Cius was sent to another HISD campus, where he said he was assigned to monitor the halls.
“I feel so bad for the taxpayers because they’re paying me for not doing anything at all,” he said....
Professional Educator: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy
...Heather Hackman operates Hackman Consulting Group and was formerly a professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, where she taught future teachers. On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.
In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.
“Education is not about the mere reproduction of knowledge,” Hackman said. “Education is the practice of freedom. And as a result, we have to have [teaching] students becomes activists as well as teachers.”
Creating educators who are proper activists, Hackman continued, means training them to not only to encourage diversity but also to engage with the systemic oppression she says is pervasive in the entire educational system. In Hackman’s telling, virtually everything associated with being a good student in modern education is actually just a tool of racist white supremacy.
“The racial narrative of White tends to be like this: Rugged individual, honest, hard-working, disciplined, rigorous, successful,” she said. “And so then, the narrative of U.S. public education: Individual assessments, competition, outcome over process (I care more about your grades than how you’re doing), ‘discipline’ where we care more about your attendance and making sure you’re not tardy than we care about your relationships … proper English must be spoken (which is just assimilation into standard U.S. dialect), hierarchical power structure, and heavy goal orientation.”...
...Hackman said when she was a professor, she freely employed these methods with her own students. She once let a student complete an essay assignment as a graphic novel, and allowed students to write in non-standard English or even foreign languages she herself couldn’t read.
“If I don’t know [your language,] frankly, that’s my issue,” she said. “All I need to know is that you’re thinking about it, I don’t really care how you do it.”
But Hackman acknowledged in the current white supremacist system, there is some expectation that teachers will know conventional English and possess other basic knowledge. As a result, she admitted modern activist teachers should try to learn those things sufficiently to get a job, but only for the purpose of infiltrating schools to change them from within.
“My long game was, get you in, get you tenured, get you in that system and change that system,” she said.......She predicted her approach will triumph, and the sinister force she dubbed “Super-Whitey” (and compared to the Eye of Sauron) will eventually be swept aside.
“Your time has come,” Hackman said. “If I was a white faculty member and unwilling to get with the program, I do not have any business in teacher education … We do see you, Super-Whitey. We’re coming for you.”
Monday, May 30, 2016
Prof Who Won't Recommend a Pro-Gun Student Is Everything That's Wrong with Academia
...Reading the full column, it quickly becomes clear that the professor believes everyone who has encountered a gun and not recoiled in horror is a sociopath. She doesn't have very well-developed reasons for thinking this—she says guns were part of her life growing up but does not suggest that they were ever used improperly. Her mother got rid of the family gun because they worried her father was suicidal, and no gun-related harm ever came to him or anyone else. If anything, the professor seems to have an inexplicable fear of guns, though she is entitled to feel that way.
She is also entitled to decline to write a letter of recommendation. But—and this point needs to be stressed—her reasons for not wanting to recommend Sarah are abhorrent. Sarah's views about guns have nothing do with being a good student, and it's not even clear what her views are: she's merely made a couple vaguely pro-gun statements. It's cultural, rather than political: Sarah is the kind of person—a guns person—that the professor instinctively dislikes. ...
Missouri State Students Warned: Police Only Exist To Protect White Male Privilege
A poster campaign at Missouri State University sought to privilege-shame students for being straight, white, male, Christian or able-bodied (among other characteristics) and informed students that the police only exist to protect white men.
The posters were sponsored by the university’s student government and Residence Hall Association (RHA) and reportedly went up inside a dorm Saturday morning before being removed on Sunday night in the face of backlash from students on Twitter. The Daily Caller obtained pictures of six of the posters from an MSU student before they were taken down....
...Reading the full column, it quickly becomes clear that the professor believes everyone who has encountered a gun and not recoiled in horror is a sociopath. She doesn't have very well-developed reasons for thinking this—she says guns were part of her life growing up but does not suggest that they were ever used improperly. Her mother got rid of the family gun because they worried her father was suicidal, and no gun-related harm ever came to him or anyone else. If anything, the professor seems to have an inexplicable fear of guns, though she is entitled to feel that way.
She is also entitled to decline to write a letter of recommendation. But—and this point needs to be stressed—her reasons for not wanting to recommend Sarah are abhorrent. Sarah's views about guns have nothing do with being a good student, and it's not even clear what her views are: she's merely made a couple vaguely pro-gun statements. It's cultural, rather than political: Sarah is the kind of person—a guns person—that the professor instinctively dislikes. ...
Missouri State Students Warned: Police Only Exist To Protect White Male Privilege
A poster campaign at Missouri State University sought to privilege-shame students for being straight, white, male, Christian or able-bodied (among other characteristics) and informed students that the police only exist to protect white men.
The posters were sponsored by the university’s student government and Residence Hall Association (RHA) and reportedly went up inside a dorm Saturday morning before being removed on Sunday night in the face of backlash from students on Twitter. The Daily Caller obtained pictures of six of the posters from an MSU student before they were taken down....
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?
...‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’....
...Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’
In contrast, reading stories at bedtime, argues Swift, gives rise to acceptable familial relationship goods, even though this also bestows advantage.
‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,’ he says....
...‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’....
...Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’
In contrast, reading stories at bedtime, argues Swift, gives rise to acceptable familial relationship goods, even though this also bestows advantage.
‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,’ he says....
Team Obama is setting us up for another housing-market collapse
...As Paul Sperry recently noted in The Post, Team Obama has pushed mortgage lenders to offer home loans to folks with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market collapse.
Wasn’t the last one bad enough?
Credit scores of approved borrowers, for example, have been trending down, even as their debt levels have grown.
The Federal Housing Administration and government-sponsored “independent” lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been demanding lower credit standards — just as the feds did starting under President Bill Clinton, in pursuit of the same “affordable housing” goal....
...As Paul Sperry recently noted in The Post, Team Obama has pushed mortgage lenders to offer home loans to folks with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market collapse.
Wasn’t the last one bad enough?
Credit scores of approved borrowers, for example, have been trending down, even as their debt levels have grown.
The Federal Housing Administration and government-sponsored “independent” lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been demanding lower credit standards — just as the feds did starting under President Bill Clinton, in pursuit of the same “affordable housing” goal....
Venezuela Drifts Into New Territory: Hunger, Blackouts and Government Shutdown
...For Vanessa Arneta, who lives with seven relatives in an apartment on the outskirts of Caracas, it’s the disappearance of the city’s water that is causing the most pain. Water arrives just once a week, on Thursdays, to her neighborhood of San Antonio de los Altos.
That day, they quickly divide up the chores. A nephew gets into the shower while another one washes the dishes, Ms. Arneta says. One of her brothers washes up the bathroom, while someone else fills buckets with water for later.
But Ms. Arneta says the water is now a brownish color and is making her family sick. Many Venezuelans say they have gotten skin irritations from showering or from the inability to bathe and wash their sheets and towels.
Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.
But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products....
Venezuela Is Falling Apart
...The entrepreneur’s ordeal started about a year ago, when the factory union began to insist on enforcing an obscure clause in its collective-bargaining agreement requiring the factory’s restrooms to be stocked with toilet paper at all times. The problem was that, amid deepening shortages of virtually all basic products (from rice and milk to deodorant and condoms) finding even one roll of toilet paper was nearly impossible in Venezuela—let alone finding enough for hundreds of workers. When the entrepreneur did manage to find some TP, his workers, understandably, took it home: It was just as hard for them to find it as it was for him.
Toilet-paper theft may sound like a farce, but it’s a serious matter for the entrepreneur: Failing to stock the restrooms puts him in violation of his agreement with the union, and that puts his factory at risk of a prolonged strike, which in turn could lead to its being seized by the socialist government under the increasingly unpopular President Nicolas Maduro. So the entrepreneur turned to the black market, where he found an apparent solution: a supplier able to deliver, all at once, enough TP to last a few months. (We’re not naming the entrepreneur lest the government retaliate against him.) The price was steep but he had no other option—his company was at risk.
But the problem wasn’t solved.
No sooner had the TP delivery reached the factory than the secret police swept in. Seizing the toilet paper, they claimed they had busted a major hoarding operation, part of a U.S.-backed “economic war” the Maduro government holds responsible for creating Venezuela’s shortages in the first place. The entrepreneur and three of his top managers faced criminal prosecution and possible jail time.
All of this over toilet paper....
Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals
BARCELONA, Venezuela — By morning, three newborns were already dead.
The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward.
Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died.
“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.
The economic crisis in this country has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans. It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.
Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left....
...For Vanessa Arneta, who lives with seven relatives in an apartment on the outskirts of Caracas, it’s the disappearance of the city’s water that is causing the most pain. Water arrives just once a week, on Thursdays, to her neighborhood of San Antonio de los Altos.
That day, they quickly divide up the chores. A nephew gets into the shower while another one washes the dishes, Ms. Arneta says. One of her brothers washes up the bathroom, while someone else fills buckets with water for later.
But Ms. Arneta says the water is now a brownish color and is making her family sick. Many Venezuelans say they have gotten skin irritations from showering or from the inability to bathe and wash their sheets and towels.
Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.
But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products....
Venezuela Is Falling Apart
...The entrepreneur’s ordeal started about a year ago, when the factory union began to insist on enforcing an obscure clause in its collective-bargaining agreement requiring the factory’s restrooms to be stocked with toilet paper at all times. The problem was that, amid deepening shortages of virtually all basic products (from rice and milk to deodorant and condoms) finding even one roll of toilet paper was nearly impossible in Venezuela—let alone finding enough for hundreds of workers. When the entrepreneur did manage to find some TP, his workers, understandably, took it home: It was just as hard for them to find it as it was for him.
Toilet-paper theft may sound like a farce, but it’s a serious matter for the entrepreneur: Failing to stock the restrooms puts him in violation of his agreement with the union, and that puts his factory at risk of a prolonged strike, which in turn could lead to its being seized by the socialist government under the increasingly unpopular President Nicolas Maduro. So the entrepreneur turned to the black market, where he found an apparent solution: a supplier able to deliver, all at once, enough TP to last a few months. (We’re not naming the entrepreneur lest the government retaliate against him.) The price was steep but he had no other option—his company was at risk.
But the problem wasn’t solved.
No sooner had the TP delivery reached the factory than the secret police swept in. Seizing the toilet paper, they claimed they had busted a major hoarding operation, part of a U.S.-backed “economic war” the Maduro government holds responsible for creating Venezuela’s shortages in the first place. The entrepreneur and three of his top managers faced criminal prosecution and possible jail time.
All of this over toilet paper....
Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals
BARCELONA, Venezuela — By morning, three newborns were already dead.
The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward.
Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died.
“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.
The economic crisis in this country has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans. It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.
Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left....
Gains in women’s rights haven't made women happier. Why is that?"
...Of course, things happened during the period in question that probably made American women less happy. Take, for example, the massive rise in incarceration rates among their actual and potential male partners. (This rise wouldn’t have left traces in the male happiness data because prisoners were not included in life satisfaction surveys.)...
Hillary Clinton asserted that women "have always been the primary victims of war" during a domestic violence conference in 1998.
... Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. ..
Dear Sh*tty Wives: This Is Your Wake-Up Call
Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences
...But the prevailing theory is that modern marriage is what’s killing marriage — that the more deliberation women put into whom they pair up with, the more willing and motivated they are to make a move when something’s not working. “The gender gap in adultery is closing, and it’s not just about opportunity and possibility,” says Helen Fisher, PhD, author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. “But it is about choice. Women now are more aware of the alternatives to monogamy and more inclined to demand to have all their needs met. That’s because happiness is such an important part of marriage. Fewer women are marrying out of need; instead, they’re marrying to please themselves. But that also means when they’re dissatisfied with something they feel justified to go elsewhere.”...
...“Women are more forgiven because it’s the struggle of being a certain type of powerful woman,” she says. “You were a different person when you began the relationship. And he’s just not.”
ACADEMIC ABSURDITY OF THE WEEK: HOBOSEXUALITY?
...The following article introduces the hobosexual as a concept in queer materialism. Mapped at the intersection of not-for-profit hobo sex and labor practices historically, the hobosexual collapses the apparent impasse between the material and the symbolic so prevalent in queer studies. The concept represents the redeployment of queer as anti-capitalist practice; highlighted are the non-normative hobo practices of nonproductive expenditure, but also the recognition that these abnormalities are organized by capitalist systems of normalization designed to engender profit. The article also considers the degree to which industrial capitalism affected both hobo mobility and hobo anti-capitalist practice in the 19th century. Generated out of hobo history and queer as anti-capitalist practice, the hobosexual represents resistance to capitalist systems of normalization and enables connections, not necessarily between identities, but between anti-capitalist practices generated out of difference....
Across The Country, Universities Look To Mainstream Polyamory
...Just this March, Portland State University hosted an event on polyamory as part of “Sex Week,” sponsored by the university’s Queer Resource Center. Students were invited to attend a discussion titled “Exploring Non-Monogamy.” The event was hosted in partnership with PSU’s “Polyamory Alliance,” a pro-polyamory student group.
According to the group’s description, the Polyamory Alliance “advocates, educates, and provides support and community to those who are polyamorous or those who identify as monogamous but would like to show support to the polyamorous person in their life.” ...
...Of course, things happened during the period in question that probably made American women less happy. Take, for example, the massive rise in incarceration rates among their actual and potential male partners. (This rise wouldn’t have left traces in the male happiness data because prisoners were not included in life satisfaction surveys.)...
Hillary Clinton asserted that women "have always been the primary victims of war" during a domestic violence conference in 1998.
... Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. ..
Dear Sh*tty Wives: This Is Your Wake-Up Call
Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences
...But the prevailing theory is that modern marriage is what’s killing marriage — that the more deliberation women put into whom they pair up with, the more willing and motivated they are to make a move when something’s not working. “The gender gap in adultery is closing, and it’s not just about opportunity and possibility,” says Helen Fisher, PhD, author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. “But it is about choice. Women now are more aware of the alternatives to monogamy and more inclined to demand to have all their needs met. That’s because happiness is such an important part of marriage. Fewer women are marrying out of need; instead, they’re marrying to please themselves. But that also means when they’re dissatisfied with something they feel justified to go elsewhere.”...
...“Women are more forgiven because it’s the struggle of being a certain type of powerful woman,” she says. “You were a different person when you began the relationship. And he’s just not.”
ACADEMIC ABSURDITY OF THE WEEK: HOBOSEXUALITY?
...The following article introduces the hobosexual as a concept in queer materialism. Mapped at the intersection of not-for-profit hobo sex and labor practices historically, the hobosexual collapses the apparent impasse between the material and the symbolic so prevalent in queer studies. The concept represents the redeployment of queer as anti-capitalist practice; highlighted are the non-normative hobo practices of nonproductive expenditure, but also the recognition that these abnormalities are organized by capitalist systems of normalization designed to engender profit. The article also considers the degree to which industrial capitalism affected both hobo mobility and hobo anti-capitalist practice in the 19th century. Generated out of hobo history and queer as anti-capitalist practice, the hobosexual represents resistance to capitalist systems of normalization and enables connections, not necessarily between identities, but between anti-capitalist practices generated out of difference....
Across The Country, Universities Look To Mainstream Polyamory
...Just this March, Portland State University hosted an event on polyamory as part of “Sex Week,” sponsored by the university’s Queer Resource Center. Students were invited to attend a discussion titled “Exploring Non-Monogamy.” The event was hosted in partnership with PSU’s “Polyamory Alliance,” a pro-polyamory student group.
According to the group’s description, the Polyamory Alliance “advocates, educates, and provides support and community to those who are polyamorous or those who identify as monogamous but would like to show support to the polyamorous person in their life.” ...
Sunday, May 15, 2016
The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along
...But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.
The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.
The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets.
A version of the graph appears in a leaked draft of the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report due out later this year. It comes as leading climate scientists begin to admit that their worst fears about global warming will not be realised.
Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century.
But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower. Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.
The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature since January 1997 – as this newspaper first disclosed last year. ...
Happy Earth Day: A Reprise of Failed Doom
1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”
Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Wald was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He even flew to Moscow at one point to advise the leader of the Soviet Union on environmental policy.
Despite his assistance to a communist government, civilization still exists. The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats has fallen as civilization failed to end by environmental catastrophe.
2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”
Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. His dire predictions failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The world’s Gross Domestic Product per person has immeasurably grown despite increases in population.
Ehrlich is largely responsible for this view, having co-published “The Population Bomb” with The Sierra Club in 1968. The book made a number of claims including that millions of humans would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, mass famines would sweep England leading to the country’s demise, and that ecological destruction would devastate the planet causing the collapse of civilization.
3: “Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”
Paul Ehrlich also made the above claim in 1970, shortly before an agricultural revolution that caused the world’s food supply to rapidly increase.
Ehrlich has consistently failed to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they did not occur, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”
4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World … Will Be In Famine”
Environmentalists in 1970 truly believed in a scientific consensus predicting global famine due to population growth in the developing world, especially in India.
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. ”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
India, where the famines were supposed to begin, recently became one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products and food supply per person in the country has drastically increased in recent years. In fact, the number of people in every country listed by Gunter has risen dramatically since 1970.
5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution”
Life magazine stated in January 1970 that scientist had “solid experimental and theoretical evidence” to believe that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”
Despite the prediction, air quality has been improving worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Air pollution has also sharply declined in industrialized countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas environmentalists are worried about today, is odorless, invisible and harmless to humans in normal amounts.
6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License”
David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was also essential in founding Friends of the Earth and the League Of Conservation Voters and much of the modern environmental movement.
Brower believed that most environmental problems were ultimately attributable to new technology that allowed humans to pass natural limits on population size. He famously stated before his death in 2000 that “all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent” and repeatedly advocated for mandatory birth control.
Today, the only major government to ever get close to his vision has been China, which ended its one-child policy last October.
7: “By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”
On Earth Day in 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt famously predicted that the world would run out of oil saying, “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Numerous academics like Watt predicted that American oil production peaked in 1970 and would gradually decline, likely causing a global economic meltdown. However, the successful application of massive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused American oil production to come roaring back and there is currently too much oil on the market.
American oil and natural gas reserves are at their highest levels since 1972 and American oil production in 2014 was 80 percent higher than in 2008 thanks to fracking.
Furthermore, the U.S. now controls the world’s largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River Formation in Colorado. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil shale, half of which may be recoverable. That’s five and a half times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. This single geologic formation could contain more oil than the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.
95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong
...Whether humans are the cause of 100% of the observed warming or not, the conclusion is that global warming isn’t as bad as was predicted. That should have major policy implications…assuming policy is still informed by facts more than emotions and political aspirations.
And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats.
I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good....
Apparently Everyone Now Agrees Science Is Badly Broken
My "Broken Science" cover article in Reason now has a lot of company. In that article I noted that "there is no one single cause for the increase in nonreproducible findings in so many fields. One key problem is that the types of research most likely to make it from lab benches into leading scientific journals are those containing flashy never-before-reported results. Such findings are often too good to check. 'All of the incentives are for researchers to write a good story—to provide journal editors with positive results, clean results, and novel results,' notes the University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek. 'This creates publication bias, and that is likely to be the central cause of the proliferation of false discoveries.'"...
...Science is often thought of as a dispassionate search for the truth. But, of course, we are all only human. And most people want to climb the professional ladder. The main way to do that if you’re a scientist is to get grants and publish lots of papers. The problem is that journals have a clear preference for research showing strong, positive relationships – between a particular medical treatment and improved health, for example. This means researchers often try to find those sorts of results. A few go as far as making things up. But a huge number tinker with their research in ways they think are harmless, but which can bias the outcome....
RICO Climate Alarmists FOIA Emails Released
...Attorney General Loretta Lynch has referred to the FBI the question as to whether people who question the scientific consensus about climate change should be prosecuted.
Lynch might have been acting on a request from George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla, who—with 19 others—wrote a letter urging the administration to follow the advice of Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) and go after "corporations and other organizations" by using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, RICO is an anti-mafia statute written to help "prosecute individuals tied to loansharking and murder-for-hire."
Speaking of rackets: Shukla is the founder and head of the Institute of Global Environment and Society. His wife is the business manager, and his daughter is the assistant to the president. The organization gets 98 percent of its funding from the government, and the Shuklas have reaped more than $5 million from it over the years....
The Climate Wars Get Ugly
...The climate skeptics have a point. An incident from a decade ago shows how tricky the analysis of the science can get. Professor Naomi Oreskes, then at the University of California, analyzed some thousand papers on global warming and concluded that over 75 percent of them backed the view that global warming was largely attributable to human intervention. But when Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool University looked at the same data, he concluded that only one-third could be read to support the consensus view, and that, of those, only one percent did so explicitly. Oreskes’s paper has been cited from President Obama on down while Peiser’s paper has been rejected not because it was wrong, but because its conclusions were, so it was said, already widely known. More recent studies in line with Peiser’s have been met with a similar skeptical response.
In principle, it should be possible to separate the scientific issues from the political ones. But in today’s overheated political environment, that is difficult to do. The latest example of the politicization of climate change comes via twenty state Attorney Generals, led by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who are bringing civil and criminal legal actions against ExxonMobil. A similar course of action has been proposed by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehead, who advocates investigations of fossil fuel companies for possible violations of the civil and criminal law....
...Indeed, one troublesome part of this debate is the weak correlation between temperature increases and the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations. Data presented by climate scientist John Christy shows that the standard models have not done well against actual data for the past 37 years. These climate models have predicted temperature increases three-fold that of those that have been observed, and the greatest errors in the models were where the increases in carbon dioxide concentrations were the largest. Models, as Christy warned, “are properly defined as scientific hypotheses or claims—model output cannot be considered as providing proof of the links between climate variations and greenhouse gases.” That is especially true for models whose predictions have been falsified over a forty-year period. It seems even clearer that these models should never be used as the basis of criminal prosecutions or civil investigations....
The Left Is Coming for You Next
...New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is taking a similar approach. He isn’t sure what law Exxon has broken, but he promises to find one, making different accusations and arguments as the venue demands. Barack Obama’s so-called Justice Department is considering filing a case of its own.
Despite the insistence of Democrats in positions of power, this is not a “fraud” investigation. There has been no credible case made — none whatsoever — that any fraud has been committed.
We should, while it is permitted, be as plain as possible about what is happening here: This is an act of obvious, gross, and indefensible political suppression, with two ends: One is riling up young, white, middle-income progressives before the 2016 election (in which California’s Democratic attorney general, Kamala Harris, is a Senate candidate), voters who care a great deal about global warming and not very much about freedom of speech; the second is financial, in that Exxon, the second most valuable firm on Earth by market capitalization, has a great deal of money, and may be bullied into a settlement that will fund a great deal of Democratic activism for years to come.
Scientific Regress
...Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.
And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work.
Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction....
...What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons....
Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesels say scientists
Eco-friendly electric and hybrid cars fill air with as many toxins as diesels
That was finding of a study looking at particles from tyre and brake wear
Greener alternative produces more tiny particles because they are heavier
Made heavier by batteries and parts meaning tyres and brakes wear faster
SlashDerp: Does More Carbon Dioxide Mean Increased Crop Water Productivity?
For the most part, we think of rising levels of carbon dioxide as an environmental problem. But atmospheric CO2 can also boost agricultural productivity by helping plants grow. How do these potential issues balance out? In an investigation recently published in Nature Climate Change, scientists have looked into the global implications of carbon dioxide's ability to enhance agricultural productivity. Increased levels of CO2 can enhance photosynthesis and reduce leaf-level transpiration, the process by which some of the water that plants draw from the ground gets released back into the atmosphere. These changes can reduce growing seasons and water loss. The result could be an increase in what's called "crop water productivity," i.e. the amount of food produced for each unit of water expended. If elevated CO2 levels increase crop yield and reduce water consumption at large scales, this could help ensure water and food security despite the climate disruptions. By combining data from a massive network of field experiments and global crop models, the scientists claimed that depending on the crop type, global crop water productivity will increase by 10 to 27 percent by the 2080s. Arid regions exhibited large increases that were based on crop type....
SlashDerp: Rise In CO2 Has 'Greened Planet Earth'
Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society have driven a huge growth in trees and other plants. A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA. Climate skeptics argue the findings show that the extra CO2 is actually benefiting the planet. But the researchers say the fertilization effect diminishes over time. They warn the positives of CO2 are likely to be outweighed by the negatives. The lead author, Professor Ranga Myneni from Boston University, told BBC News the extra tree growth would not compensate for global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, ocean acidification, the loss of Arctic sea ice, and the prediction of more severe tropical storms. The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries....
SlashDerp: Global Warming Has Made the Weather Better For Most In US -- For Now
Since Americans first heard the term global warming in the 1970s, the weather has actually improved for most people living in the U.S.. But it won't always be that way, according to a new study. Research shows Americans typically -- and perhaps unsurprisingly -- like warmer winters and dislike hot, humid summers. And they reveal their weather preferences by moving to areas with conditions they like best. A new study in the journal Nature has found that 80% of the U.S. population lives in counties experiencing more pleasant weather than they did 40 years ago. "Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes," writes Patrick Egan, a political scientist at New York University, and Megan Mullin, professor of environmental politics at Duke University. However, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, 88% of the current population will live in areas where the weather is less pleasant than it was before. The paper does not predict how changing weather patterns will influence migration patterns over the coming century....
...But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.
The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.
The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets.
A version of the graph appears in a leaked draft of the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report due out later this year. It comes as leading climate scientists begin to admit that their worst fears about global warming will not be realised.
Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century.
But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower. Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.
The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature since January 1997 – as this newspaper first disclosed last year. ...
Happy Earth Day: A Reprise of Failed Doom
1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”
Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Wald was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He even flew to Moscow at one point to advise the leader of the Soviet Union on environmental policy.
Despite his assistance to a communist government, civilization still exists. The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats has fallen as civilization failed to end by environmental catastrophe.
2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”
Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. His dire predictions failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The world’s Gross Domestic Product per person has immeasurably grown despite increases in population.
Ehrlich is largely responsible for this view, having co-published “The Population Bomb” with The Sierra Club in 1968. The book made a number of claims including that millions of humans would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, mass famines would sweep England leading to the country’s demise, and that ecological destruction would devastate the planet causing the collapse of civilization.
3: “Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”
Paul Ehrlich also made the above claim in 1970, shortly before an agricultural revolution that caused the world’s food supply to rapidly increase.
Ehrlich has consistently failed to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they did not occur, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”
4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World … Will Be In Famine”
Environmentalists in 1970 truly believed in a scientific consensus predicting global famine due to population growth in the developing world, especially in India.
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. ”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
India, where the famines were supposed to begin, recently became one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products and food supply per person in the country has drastically increased in recent years. In fact, the number of people in every country listed by Gunter has risen dramatically since 1970.
5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution”
Life magazine stated in January 1970 that scientist had “solid experimental and theoretical evidence” to believe that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”
Despite the prediction, air quality has been improving worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Air pollution has also sharply declined in industrialized countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas environmentalists are worried about today, is odorless, invisible and harmless to humans in normal amounts.
6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License”
David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was also essential in founding Friends of the Earth and the League Of Conservation Voters and much of the modern environmental movement.
Brower believed that most environmental problems were ultimately attributable to new technology that allowed humans to pass natural limits on population size. He famously stated before his death in 2000 that “all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent” and repeatedly advocated for mandatory birth control.
Today, the only major government to ever get close to his vision has been China, which ended its one-child policy last October.
7: “By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”
On Earth Day in 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt famously predicted that the world would run out of oil saying, “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Numerous academics like Watt predicted that American oil production peaked in 1970 and would gradually decline, likely causing a global economic meltdown. However, the successful application of massive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused American oil production to come roaring back and there is currently too much oil on the market.
American oil and natural gas reserves are at their highest levels since 1972 and American oil production in 2014 was 80 percent higher than in 2008 thanks to fracking.
Furthermore, the U.S. now controls the world’s largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River Formation in Colorado. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil shale, half of which may be recoverable. That’s five and a half times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. This single geologic formation could contain more oil than the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.
95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong
...Whether humans are the cause of 100% of the observed warming or not, the conclusion is that global warming isn’t as bad as was predicted. That should have major policy implications…assuming policy is still informed by facts more than emotions and political aspirations.
And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats.
I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good....
Apparently Everyone Now Agrees Science Is Badly Broken
My "Broken Science" cover article in Reason now has a lot of company. In that article I noted that "there is no one single cause for the increase in nonreproducible findings in so many fields. One key problem is that the types of research most likely to make it from lab benches into leading scientific journals are those containing flashy never-before-reported results. Such findings are often too good to check. 'All of the incentives are for researchers to write a good story—to provide journal editors with positive results, clean results, and novel results,' notes the University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek. 'This creates publication bias, and that is likely to be the central cause of the proliferation of false discoveries.'"...
...Science is often thought of as a dispassionate search for the truth. But, of course, we are all only human. And most people want to climb the professional ladder. The main way to do that if you’re a scientist is to get grants and publish lots of papers. The problem is that journals have a clear preference for research showing strong, positive relationships – between a particular medical treatment and improved health, for example. This means researchers often try to find those sorts of results. A few go as far as making things up. But a huge number tinker with their research in ways they think are harmless, but which can bias the outcome....
RICO Climate Alarmists FOIA Emails Released
...Attorney General Loretta Lynch has referred to the FBI the question as to whether people who question the scientific consensus about climate change should be prosecuted.
Lynch might have been acting on a request from George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla, who—with 19 others—wrote a letter urging the administration to follow the advice of Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) and go after "corporations and other organizations" by using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, RICO is an anti-mafia statute written to help "prosecute individuals tied to loansharking and murder-for-hire."
Speaking of rackets: Shukla is the founder and head of the Institute of Global Environment and Society. His wife is the business manager, and his daughter is the assistant to the president. The organization gets 98 percent of its funding from the government, and the Shuklas have reaped more than $5 million from it over the years....
The Climate Wars Get Ugly
...The climate skeptics have a point. An incident from a decade ago shows how tricky the analysis of the science can get. Professor Naomi Oreskes, then at the University of California, analyzed some thousand papers on global warming and concluded that over 75 percent of them backed the view that global warming was largely attributable to human intervention. But when Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool University looked at the same data, he concluded that only one-third could be read to support the consensus view, and that, of those, only one percent did so explicitly. Oreskes’s paper has been cited from President Obama on down while Peiser’s paper has been rejected not because it was wrong, but because its conclusions were, so it was said, already widely known. More recent studies in line with Peiser’s have been met with a similar skeptical response.
In principle, it should be possible to separate the scientific issues from the political ones. But in today’s overheated political environment, that is difficult to do. The latest example of the politicization of climate change comes via twenty state Attorney Generals, led by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who are bringing civil and criminal legal actions against ExxonMobil. A similar course of action has been proposed by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehead, who advocates investigations of fossil fuel companies for possible violations of the civil and criminal law....
...Indeed, one troublesome part of this debate is the weak correlation between temperature increases and the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations. Data presented by climate scientist John Christy shows that the standard models have not done well against actual data for the past 37 years. These climate models have predicted temperature increases three-fold that of those that have been observed, and the greatest errors in the models were where the increases in carbon dioxide concentrations were the largest. Models, as Christy warned, “are properly defined as scientific hypotheses or claims—model output cannot be considered as providing proof of the links between climate variations and greenhouse gases.” That is especially true for models whose predictions have been falsified over a forty-year period. It seems even clearer that these models should never be used as the basis of criminal prosecutions or civil investigations....
The Left Is Coming for You Next
...New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is taking a similar approach. He isn’t sure what law Exxon has broken, but he promises to find one, making different accusations and arguments as the venue demands. Barack Obama’s so-called Justice Department is considering filing a case of its own.
Despite the insistence of Democrats in positions of power, this is not a “fraud” investigation. There has been no credible case made — none whatsoever — that any fraud has been committed.
We should, while it is permitted, be as plain as possible about what is happening here: This is an act of obvious, gross, and indefensible political suppression, with two ends: One is riling up young, white, middle-income progressives before the 2016 election (in which California’s Democratic attorney general, Kamala Harris, is a Senate candidate), voters who care a great deal about global warming and not very much about freedom of speech; the second is financial, in that Exxon, the second most valuable firm on Earth by market capitalization, has a great deal of money, and may be bullied into a settlement that will fund a great deal of Democratic activism for years to come.
Scientific Regress
...Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.
And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work.
Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction....
...What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons....
Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesels say scientists
Eco-friendly electric and hybrid cars fill air with as many toxins as diesels
That was finding of a study looking at particles from tyre and brake wear
Greener alternative produces more tiny particles because they are heavier
Made heavier by batteries and parts meaning tyres and brakes wear faster
SlashDerp: Does More Carbon Dioxide Mean Increased Crop Water Productivity?
For the most part, we think of rising levels of carbon dioxide as an environmental problem. But atmospheric CO2 can also boost agricultural productivity by helping plants grow. How do these potential issues balance out? In an investigation recently published in Nature Climate Change, scientists have looked into the global implications of carbon dioxide's ability to enhance agricultural productivity. Increased levels of CO2 can enhance photosynthesis and reduce leaf-level transpiration, the process by which some of the water that plants draw from the ground gets released back into the atmosphere. These changes can reduce growing seasons and water loss. The result could be an increase in what's called "crop water productivity," i.e. the amount of food produced for each unit of water expended. If elevated CO2 levels increase crop yield and reduce water consumption at large scales, this could help ensure water and food security despite the climate disruptions. By combining data from a massive network of field experiments and global crop models, the scientists claimed that depending on the crop type, global crop water productivity will increase by 10 to 27 percent by the 2080s. Arid regions exhibited large increases that were based on crop type....
SlashDerp: Rise In CO2 Has 'Greened Planet Earth'
Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society have driven a huge growth in trees and other plants. A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA. Climate skeptics argue the findings show that the extra CO2 is actually benefiting the planet. But the researchers say the fertilization effect diminishes over time. They warn the positives of CO2 are likely to be outweighed by the negatives. The lead author, Professor Ranga Myneni from Boston University, told BBC News the extra tree growth would not compensate for global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, ocean acidification, the loss of Arctic sea ice, and the prediction of more severe tropical storms. The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries....
SlashDerp: Global Warming Has Made the Weather Better For Most In US -- For Now
Since Americans first heard the term global warming in the 1970s, the weather has actually improved for most people living in the U.S.. But it won't always be that way, according to a new study. Research shows Americans typically -- and perhaps unsurprisingly -- like warmer winters and dislike hot, humid summers. And they reveal their weather preferences by moving to areas with conditions they like best. A new study in the journal Nature has found that 80% of the U.S. population lives in counties experiencing more pleasant weather than they did 40 years ago. "Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes," writes Patrick Egan, a political scientist at New York University, and Megan Mullin, professor of environmental politics at Duke University. However, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, 88% of the current population will live in areas where the weather is less pleasant than it was before. The paper does not predict how changing weather patterns will influence migration patterns over the coming century....
I Want the Benefits of Maternity Leave Without Bothering to Have Children, Says Stupid Fat Whore
...It's extraordinary that feminists claim they want the right to work, then when they get the right to work like men do -- meaning, you show up at your job and work and no, you can't just take a sabbatical (me-battical?) when you feel like you Just Can't Even -- they begin bitching and moaning and claiming they need society to reconform itself yet again to accommodate their ever-growing list of vital needs and demands.
If you don't want to work, fine -- get married, be a housewife.
But what is this shit with the claims that they want to work, and then the constant whining about what work actually entails?..
Ladies, You Need to Stop Husband-Shaming
...The basis of every complaint is basically this: Why doesn’t my husband respect me enough? And yet, the wives have taken the opportunity to voice this discontent by posting about their husbands online, where strangers, acquaintances, and even family members and friends are invited to judge the husbands’ behavior. Nothing says mutual respect quite like public humiliation, am I right?...
Agony of being a 50/50 mum: Women once held the upper hand in custody battles. Now fathers are winning EQUAL access... and mothers are struggling to cope
Nicola Hewitt, 42, an office manager from Kenley, Surrey, faces the trauma of being without her children Devon, 10, and Sonny, eight, every weekend
...This is the reality for Britain's growing legion of 50/50 mothers, who divide their time with the children equally with their exes. It's a growing phenomenon that - on the surface - might seem the fairest way for separated parents to organise their lives.
But it comes at an emotional price for the mothers involved - and the consequences for children are as yet untold.
Veronica Sweeney-Bird is one such mother who wishes more than anything that her two little girls were having a more relaxed, stable childhood. Instead, every other Thursday, she drops one off at nursery and one at primary school, full of foreboding as she kisses them goodbye....
The corporate ‘cure’ for sexual harassment only feeds the disease
...We all know in the real world the off-color joke told by the cool male coworker may be deemed acceptable, but when uttered by the awkward, pot-bellied, older guy, it’s contributing to a hostile environment and potential fodder for a lawsuit.
A woman who wants to go out with her colleague or even her supervisor may well be flattered when he makes an advance, but the hapless guy who mistakenly thought she was interested can end up in big trouble....
...It's extraordinary that feminists claim they want the right to work, then when they get the right to work like men do -- meaning, you show up at your job and work and no, you can't just take a sabbatical (me-battical?) when you feel like you Just Can't Even -- they begin bitching and moaning and claiming they need society to reconform itself yet again to accommodate their ever-growing list of vital needs and demands.
If you don't want to work, fine -- get married, be a housewife.
But what is this shit with the claims that they want to work, and then the constant whining about what work actually entails?..
Ladies, You Need to Stop Husband-Shaming
...The basis of every complaint is basically this: Why doesn’t my husband respect me enough? And yet, the wives have taken the opportunity to voice this discontent by posting about their husbands online, where strangers, acquaintances, and even family members and friends are invited to judge the husbands’ behavior. Nothing says mutual respect quite like public humiliation, am I right?...
Agony of being a 50/50 mum: Women once held the upper hand in custody battles. Now fathers are winning EQUAL access... and mothers are struggling to cope
Nicola Hewitt, 42, an office manager from Kenley, Surrey, faces the trauma of being without her children Devon, 10, and Sonny, eight, every weekend
...This is the reality for Britain's growing legion of 50/50 mothers, who divide their time with the children equally with their exes. It's a growing phenomenon that - on the surface - might seem the fairest way for separated parents to organise their lives.
But it comes at an emotional price for the mothers involved - and the consequences for children are as yet untold.
Veronica Sweeney-Bird is one such mother who wishes more than anything that her two little girls were having a more relaxed, stable childhood. Instead, every other Thursday, she drops one off at nursery and one at primary school, full of foreboding as she kisses them goodbye....
The corporate ‘cure’ for sexual harassment only feeds the disease
...We all know in the real world the off-color joke told by the cool male coworker may be deemed acceptable, but when uttered by the awkward, pot-bellied, older guy, it’s contributing to a hostile environment and potential fodder for a lawsuit.
A woman who wants to go out with her colleague or even her supervisor may well be flattered when he makes an advance, but the hapless guy who mistakenly thought she was interested can end up in big trouble....
Sunday, April 17, 2016
The House That Uncle Sam Built
...These problems were created by actions by the Federal Reserve combined with government housing policy (especially the government- sponsored enterprises - Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae). Misguided government interference in the market is the real culprit in laying the foundation for the Great Recession.
This paper provides a “common sense” and understandable outline of fundamental causes and cures. The analysis is based on long proven economic laws. Despite the wishes and hopes of politicians, economic laws are just as immutable as the laws of physics. If you jump off a ten story building, hitting the ground will not be pleasant. If the Federal Reserve holds interest rates below the natural market rate by rapidly expanding the money supply (“printing” money) as Alan Greenspan did, individuals and businesses will make bad investment decisions and there will be negative consequences to our long term economic well-being. There are no free lunches....
...These problems were created by actions by the Federal Reserve combined with government housing policy (especially the government- sponsored enterprises - Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae). Misguided government interference in the market is the real culprit in laying the foundation for the Great Recession.
This paper provides a “common sense” and understandable outline of fundamental causes and cures. The analysis is based on long proven economic laws. Despite the wishes and hopes of politicians, economic laws are just as immutable as the laws of physics. If you jump off a ten story building, hitting the ground will not be pleasant. If the Federal Reserve holds interest rates below the natural market rate by rapidly expanding the money supply (“printing” money) as Alan Greenspan did, individuals and businesses will make bad investment decisions and there will be negative consequences to our long term economic well-being. There are no free lunches....
BUYING 'REFORM'
...But this money didn't come from little old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.
These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).
Not exactly all household names, but the left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . .
What did this liberal foundation crowd buy with its $123 million?...
..."We had a scare," Treglia says. "As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this — that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress."
"But you know what the good news is from my perspective?" Treglia says to the stunned crowd. "Journalists didn't care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."...
...But this money didn't come from little old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.
These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).
Not exactly all household names, but the left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . .
What did this liberal foundation crowd buy with its $123 million?...
..."We had a scare," Treglia says. "As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this — that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress."
"But you know what the good news is from my perspective?" Treglia says to the stunned crowd. "Journalists didn't care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."...
In Defense of Washington
The Charge: We’re out of touch with the heartland. The Defense: The whole country should be grateful for that.
Yes, yes, America, even here in Washington—the city that can’t feel your pulse—we have a dim sense of how you feel. You consider us cloistered elitists, unaware of how life is lived. All of our ideas, you sneer, are based on books and white papers, not the gritty reality of “real” America.
In fact, that view of Washington is unlearned, impoverished, and un-American. Because the sad truth is this: Washington is not out of touch enough....
...The Charge: We’re obsessed with power and position. The Defense: Maybe—but at least we’re not obsessed with money....
The Charge: We’re out of touch with the heartland. The Defense: The whole country should be grateful for that.
Yes, yes, America, even here in Washington—the city that can’t feel your pulse—we have a dim sense of how you feel. You consider us cloistered elitists, unaware of how life is lived. All of our ideas, you sneer, are based on books and white papers, not the gritty reality of “real” America.
In fact, that view of Washington is unlearned, impoverished, and un-American. Because the sad truth is this: Washington is not out of touch enough....
...The Charge: We’re obsessed with power and position. The Defense: Maybe—but at least we’re not obsessed with money....
University introduces website to report microaggressions
The University of Michigan-Flint has launched a website where "students who experience any form of bias or micro-aggressions whatsoever" can tattle on members of their community.
In a campus-wide email sent Tuesday afternoon (and shared with the Washington Examiner), UM-Flint staff announced the new website and encouraged students, faculty and staff to begin reporting. They can even do so anonymously....
Socialism has created a humanitarian disaster in Venezuela
...But a couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans....
...The economic crisis is having a particularly nasty impact on healthcare. According to the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation, only 20 per cent of the drugs that doctors require are available. People must rely on social media to scout the country for medications for their loved ones. The lack of spare parts means that much medical equipment is useless: 86 per cent of X-Ray machines are out of service, for example. “Babies born prematurely are dying like little chicks” was a February headline of El Nacional, Venezuela’s last independent daily. It quoted a resident doctor in one of the public hospitals saying that, due to the shortages, they cannot save the lives of all patients. “We are operating under war conditions,” she said....
The University of Michigan-Flint has launched a website where "students who experience any form of bias or micro-aggressions whatsoever" can tattle on members of their community.
In a campus-wide email sent Tuesday afternoon (and shared with the Washington Examiner), UM-Flint staff announced the new website and encouraged students, faculty and staff to begin reporting. They can even do so anonymously....
Socialism has created a humanitarian disaster in Venezuela
...But a couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans....
...The economic crisis is having a particularly nasty impact on healthcare. According to the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation, only 20 per cent of the drugs that doctors require are available. People must rely on social media to scout the country for medications for their loved ones. The lack of spare parts means that much medical equipment is useless: 86 per cent of X-Ray machines are out of service, for example. “Babies born prematurely are dying like little chicks” was a February headline of El Nacional, Venezuela’s last independent daily. It quoted a resident doctor in one of the public hospitals saying that, due to the shortages, they cannot save the lives of all patients. “We are operating under war conditions,” she said....
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